Don’t Use A Planner, YOU Are The Planner!

Cue is not a daily planner.

I’ve already written about how it’s not a todo list.

But it’s also not a planner.

Let’s step back. I’m a software developer by training and profession. That means I use computers all the time.

But guess what? In its original usage, the term “computer” referred to a human being, who computed. I sometimes call myself a programmer, using the same logic. I program. Computers compute. And before we had machines to do it, people did it.

A computer was “one who calculates.” The first time the term was used to refer to a machine of any type was in 1897, hundreds of years after its first use.

This evolution of language makes a lot of sense. We’ve offloaded the job of computation, or calculation, to machines. And they can do a damn good job of it. It’s actually really great that we don’t have to worry about computing anymore, we can just tell our machine computers to do it for us.

Well, guess what? We cannot do that with planning our lives.

Hell, even if we developed really good artificial intelligence, we’re not going to want to offload planning to it, anymore than we’d ask some other human being to plan our lives for us.

Planning is personal, intimate, unique to you in ways that cannot be replicated by a computer, an artificial intelligence, or a human assistant.

Even the wealthiest people, who can hire teams to do work for them, would never ask those teams to take over their life, choosing for them how they will spend their time.

So stop talking about using a planner. I will too.

You are the planner. I am the planner.

Each of us decides our fate, from the daily tasks we do to the life altering dreams we pursue.

So what is Cue?

Maybe it’s your digital planning assistant. Or maybe it’s just a modern tickler file. Cue cards is the metaphor I like for ticklers.

Maybe it’s a suite of planning tools. You use these to build your life, like a carpenter uses woodworking tools to create furniture.

But no one would call the hammer a woodworker.

Maybe it’s your planning shelves or storage, where you store all the stuff you plan.

Or a planning workshop. This is where you go to do the work of planning. All the tools are ready at hand, and there is a place for everything.

It’s where the planner does his work.

I like that.