[Question] How to deal with non-schedulable one-off stimulus-response-pair-like situations when planning/​organising projects?

When working in projects it often happens that one task (A) must be performed after something else (B) happens. If you know B is going to happen at a particular time in the future, this is straightforward to plan—one just needs to add a reminder of A in the appropriate time slot in the calender. If it is something that happens often, one could try to use TAP (Trigger-Action Planning) if s/​he is able to train enough. However, when B is a one-off situation that will happen in an unknown time in the future, particularly if it is weeks or months in the future, it is much less obvious how to deal with this. At least for me.

So, how do you guys deal with situations like “when the paper gets published, I need to do X, Y and Z”?

What I usually do is setting reminders at whatever time interval that seems adequate for the specific situation. However, this has downsides: 1) if the interval is too short, I may get used to the reminder and just disregard it without thinking. 2) if the interval is too long, task A may be performed too late.

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