Tickler files have a horrible name.
I get the association between tickling and remembering: “I had an idea tickling my brain”.
And I get that physical file folders were once a thing.
But neither of those concepts really works well.
Like the idea of saving documents. It had to be done at one point. And it made sense at that point to use a floppy disk icon to represent it.
But now? Really? It just seems weird.
We’ve long since abandoned floppy disks, whether they were actually floppy or not.
And most apps have moved on from the concept of explicit saving to just automatically persist all your changes, all the time.
So what about tickler files?
Well, if you use one, I doubt you think about it tickling you. And I doubt you use files.
Tickler files these days are just lists of things you look through on a daily basis (or weekly, or monthly) to remind you what you’ve got on your plate. Or maybe you use an email service, so you get sent a reminder email on a particular day.
They are cues, so you can remember a script you’ve laid out for your life.
Today, that script might include a visit to the doctor, a meeting with a business partner, a trip to the grocery store to get eggs, or a some personal time set aside to write.
Tomorrow, it will be different things.
The metaphor that seems to make sense to me is to think of your life as a speech that you’re giving. This is a speech that you want to be natural, to be one that allows for some interaction with the crowd, but you also have an idea of what you want to cover and the end goal you’re trying to achieve.
So, as you go, you look down at your cue cards briefly, just a glance every few sentences or paragraphs. You see the ideas that you want to convey, and then, while responding to the mood of the crowd and adjusting to your own energy level and the flow of the talk, you work those ideas on those cue cards into your speech
This is how your life can be. It’s not tightly scripted, but adjusts and adapts as you go. Cues can help you stick to the points that need to be made, the goals you have and the important tasks that you know need to be done.
Each day, you’ll briefly go over your “cue card” for the day, with a short list of things you know should be tackled. Daily planning lets you structure your mind around those goals, fitting them into the typical pattern for the day.
Because a life is much longer than a speech, one advantage you have is that its easy to move items to a future cue card, if it doesn’t make sense to try to get something done that day. That is definitely harder to do while giving a speech, trying to move points around between paragraphs.
So maybe they are cue cards. A cue card has a bulleted list of items on it, that you want to cover during a portion of your speech.
And your cue cards for life have the tasks you want to do in your next day, or week, or month.