Find Focus 2- Tickler
A technique to master in finding your focus will be the ability to filter items that are not imminent, this often reminds me of the Sherlock Homes quote “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
Within the Tickler System, once we have isolated items that are not imminent, we are left with items where focus would be desired. Importantly we have not ‘eliminated’ them, simply deferred, intentionally deferred, this is not procrastination. The Tickler System introduces the first STRUCTURAL component to focus, TIME.
The Tickler, or Forty-three, System came to prominence in the legal profession at the turn of the Century. My introduction however came from my late Father (2020). As a Chief Fire Officer, he clearly had extensive responsibilities and I was in awe of how he maintained it all. During work experience he sat me down and walked me through his Tickler setup, how he used and had adapted it. Most of my father’s time at work was pre-computerisation but even today I still maintain a manual version, part homage to him, and part structural necessity, not everything is digital.
The core of the Tickler System involves 43 folders, one for each day of the month and 12 for the months of the year. My father’s setup used an extra one for the current day, bringing his total to 44. This extra today folder is a habit I have continued using a leather zip foolscap portfolio.
The flow is that as new items arrive, they are placed in a relevant folder. The folder items are placed in could be today, a day of the current month or a future month. If everything that arrives is a current day item there are wider issues at play than poor time management and focus.
The next stage is that at the end of a month the folders for the days of the month are moved forward and items from month about to start are placed in the appropriate day of the month folder or pushed to future months if reasonable.
The Tickler System works if used daily. For regular use folders need to be accessible. Digitisation in the modern office, such as MS Outlook and other systems, lend themselves well to the folder structure.
The principle behind the system is that everything can be assigned to either your current self, or your future self. Items that are imminent have a more clearly defined timeframe, placed in a day, while those further out just placed in the month.
There are a multitude of ways to adapt the Tickler System to develop your own style, digital or analogue. Here are the tips I recall and still use from that work experience.
THREE PEOPLE
There are three people to assign tasks to, your current self, your future self and someone else. This additional differentiation is why my father appreciated his Tickler System. He would assign something then the week before it was due add a note to ‘tickle’ them. Not all these things were delegations to his staff, simply reminders to check something had happened. It reminded him of things he had asked folk to do, he never forgot.REVIEW DATE
The date things are due was not the day to place them in, he would place them in the folder when he first wanted to look at what would be needed to be done, or when he wanted to check on progress, awareness was the keyFINISH
At the end of the day his daily folder had to be empty. He would not finish the day without emptying it. This was more a mindset than a function of the Tickler System, but immensely effective. Moving something to the next folder if it was not finished was only viable if the constraint was anything other than time, i.e., he needed someone, or something not immediately available.
There are limitations to the Tickler System, only a monthly review, reprioritisation, no threading, no ability to track location or folk through the folders, but at its heart it achieves a major step removing distractions from your immediate attention.
You should now have a shorter list of activities but re-assurance nothing has been neglected.
Links to sites on the Tickler System
How to build and use a tickler file system | Fortythree.me
Excel Tip - Movement CTRL and the F5 key.
Moving around a spreadsheet is not always about holding the mouse on the cursor bars until reaching the destination. There are some very simple ways of navigating around blocks and the sheet.
Ctrl & Arrows – By holding down the CTRL key and clicking on one of the arrows keys the cursor will move to the last point in the block. The block ends at the first empty cell.
Ctrl & Home - Start of Spreadsheet. Holding the CTRL key and then clicking on the Home key will take the cursor to the start of the spreadsheet, usually cell A1. A very quick way of returning to the start.
Ctrl & End - End of Spreadsheet. As you would expect holding CTRL and then clicking End will take you to the end of the spreadsheet, although this comes with a qualification, the last used cell in the spreadsheet may be beyond your data. There may have been items deleted or moved, unfortunately Excel remembers this location and assigns this location to a variable called ActiveSheet.UsedRange. If this is the case, I use the Ctrl arrows to get back to the data block. The ActiveSheet.UsedRange can be easily reset with a short macro but that is for another day.
F5 - this function key at the top of your keyboard has many uses. A very quick and useful one is the teleport to a cell capability. Simply press F5 and then type in the box the cell you wish to be teleported to.