Humans operate in cycles: the day, the week, the month, the year, the generation or life.
In each one there are stages: planning, planting, laboring, and harvest.
Alternately, reflection, inception, exertion, reception.
Reflection
Reflection is when you plan. You plan your day, or the next week, or the year. You look at the last cycle, consider what went well, and make plans for the coming cycle, be it a day or a month.
If all you do is make plans, you’ll be ahead of most people out there.
If you also take some time to look back, it can be a time of course correction, learning, and growth.
This is where planning mode comes in, of course.
You want to be able to see what you’ve done and what you want to do.
Although it won’t be a feature in early versions of Cue, writing in a journal is an excellent step to take during this stage.
Inception
Inception is when you start the work.
This is often a bumpy process.
You’re trying new things, beginning new work, often working against inertia to make something happen for the first time.
Success in this stage is finding the balance between following your plans, and learning from the feedback you’re getting.
Another important aspect of starting up is that you think of everything you should have thought of already.
No matter how much time you spend planning, once you actually start doing you discover all kinds of things you forgot to consider.
Those things either adjust your plans immediately, or go into your task inbox as future work.
Exertion
When the heat of the day – or the heat of the summer – arrives, you work.
You made your plans, and you got them started. You’ve moved to the stage when you have a clear direction and process for moving forward.
Maybe you had to tweak some things, or totally recreate plans after starting and seeing what you got wrong.
But now, for better or worse, it’s time to live with the plans and really crank on doing the best you can.
It’s doing mode: work through your tasks, show up to meetings, be as productive as possible.
Reception
Reception is when you receive the rewards.
This is the harvest of fall, the big dinner at the end of a long day, the fun weekend trip.
It’s still work. Harvesting can be harder work than planting.
But it’s the work of cashing in.
Another feature to add further down the road to Cue is habit tracking. Your habits are things that show up on your plans, which means you can easily check them off as you go. Being able to see your progress is a huge intrinsic reward. And you could condition some extrinsic rewards on that progress, if it were easily, naturally tracked in Cue.
Of course, all the real rewards will be outside of any tool or app.
They’ll be the body you built from months of lifting. The product you created from weeks of crafting. The money you earned from a day of consulting.
The life you build from years of consistent, directed effort.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
These natural cycles are built deeply into Cue.
Not only is the tickler file oriented towards the natural cycles of life, but the different modes in which it is used reflect the real life process of moving from planning, to planting, to labor, and finally to harvest.
You do this each day by planning, acting, adjusting, doing the work, and then planning again for the next day.
You do it each week, each month, each year.
For all of your life.