Yep, confession time.
I use a tickler, habitually. That’s a good thing.
But I have some bad habits.
Frequent Forwarding
One of my bigger issues is regularly forwarding items from one day to the next, or just to a later day. This usually means I’m avoiding something. Either I’m avoiding the work of scheduling, or I’m avoiding the work of doing..
When I’m avoiding scheduling, I forward things because it’s just not time yet, or I’m too busy to get to it yet. But I don’t factor that in when I forward it, so I just move it to the next day or the weekend, or a week later. And then do the same thing again.
When I get this right, I look ahead, think reasonably about what I can get done, and schedule the item for a day, week, or even a month in the future when I’ll actually get to it.
Of course, sometimes, I’m frequently forwarding a tickler item because I’m avoiding the work of just doing it. This happens more often with things I know I need to do, but have some resistance to. Maybe I’m a little bit scared or nervous about how it will turn out. Or it feels like a bigger project than I’m ready to tackle.
So a good way to beat that is to make it smaller. Find a way to take a step forward on that item, without having to do the whole thing. Oftentimes, that’s enough to get the ball rolling, and I still finish the whole item. Just because I started.
Another good strategy here is to write about it. Journaling can be super helpful in uncovering the reasons for the resistance and striking at their roots.
Overcrowded Days
I touched on this a bit above, but if you look through the ticklers for your coming week and see one or two days that just have a bucketload of entries, I give you permission to get worried.
I just checked mine, and I do have a day like that. Why?
There are usually two possibilities. One, I’m excited about something (or a lot of little things) and really want to use a day that I don’t think will be very busy to make progress on it/them. But usually, that’s just me being unrealistic.
The second possibility is that I’m avoiding scheduling. Same problem I mentioned above, but a different symptom. Again, writing in my journal about it is helpful, as is breaking things down into smaller steps.
For the times when I’m just being unrealistic, it can be hard to catch that. Usually, experience is the best teacher, and over time, I’ve gotten better at correctly guesstimating how much I can reasonably do in a day.
Overlooked Items
As I looked through my tickler just now I discovered another problem I have. Leaving in items that I regularly overlook. I’ve been busy the last couple months and haven’t been making BJJ happen like I used to. It was a conscious choice, but I still have a tickler item to go do BJJ on Monday’s. I haven’t taken it out, it’s just sitting there. I ignore it every Monday when it comes up.
Partly, it’s because I have some wishful thinking that one week I’ll feel like I’ve got the time to go. But really, I should move it further out in my tickler, maybe for the next month. Then when I do my monthly planning I can consider whether it’s time to pick it back up.
Another possibility with items you ignore is that they’re now habitual. You may still add them to your plan for the day, but you don’t need it to be in the tickler. This is more common with daily habits. Maybe you needed the reminder of seeing them in the tickler as you were creating the habit, but now it’s enough to just include it in your plan for each day.
Repetition
Repetition isn’t necessarily a problem. But it’s usually something that can be optimized. It took a while, but I eventually realized that I didn’t need a reminder on every tickler for things that I do daily, I just have a separate list of daily habits. Most of those become part of my daily plan, but don’t need to clutter up my tickler file.
Repetition can be useful. I highly recommend it when first creating a new habit, or when tackling a big, complex project. Better to have the repetition and remember things, than to not have it and forget.
Just watch out for when it crosses over into overlooking items because you’ve become blind from seeing them so often.
There You Have It
Four ways you can mess up when using a tickler file. And a few ideas for avoiding those pitfalls.
Happy planning!