daily tickler in wiki

I get an email every day that I look at almost the first thing in the morning, and it helps me organize and remember things all throughout my day. For some reason I don't think I've written about it for the web yet (Google doesn't know about it), so here's a snapshot.

I keep a Socialtext wiki as a personal notebook and scratchpad. In this wiki I have pages named like [2004-August-28] which are the equivalent of calendar pages for that day - a place to take diary entries of what's going on, a place to put forward looking reminders of birthdays and the like, and a chronological reference point inside wikis that are usually not very timeline-oriented.

Every day, a little Perl script mails me a set of links to that wiki - a link to today, so I can see what's on the calendar; a link to next week, next month, three months from now and next year, so I can anticipate what's going on. And with this simple reminder I'm actually doing quite a bit better at not losing things that happen in the future.

This is inspired of course by the paper tickler system in David Allen's Getting Things Done, but I found myself not going to paper quite often enough, and since I'm online too much already this is pretty easy.

Comments

[Prentiss Riddle]

For years I've used the Unix calendar(1) program as my personal tickler, noting birthdays and bills to pay and such.

For some reason many recent flavors of Unix lack the program so I wrote an approximate clone in Perl. (I'll be happy to share if anybody Googles here looking for that particular obscure item.)

Then it occurred to me that it would be nice to have my script import events from iCal as well. I don't presently use iCal, but I might if it integrated with the tools I already use. iCal has its own e-mail alarm system but it seems to work on the basis of one message per event, without a daily summary or the advance notice I'm accustomed to from calendar(1).

Alas, getting data out of iCal doesn't seem to be that easy. The shortest path I can see would be to tell it to publish to a WebDAV server and retrieve the events from that in .ics format -- not that bad, but not as easy as it might be. So I haven't gotten around to it yet.

[Edward Vielmetti]

An update on this -

I made a few tweaks to the wiki I'm using so that there's a "today", "tomorrow", and "yesterday" link in a menu bar. There are also active "100 days" and "1000 days" links that point to the right pages so that when I want to think in advance I can manage to make it work with minimal hassle.

I'm looking forward to re-reading some of my 100 days in advance predictions, and especially to figuring out if what I was looking forward to 1000 days from now still makes sense.

For birthdays, I'm now using iCal and the iCal Birthday Shifter to remember them. (How do you remember birthdays?) I go back to the wiki monthly and copy out the dates into iCal.

For the paper tickler, I've taken to putting today's random paper crap into tomorrow's folder at bedtime, so that I can at least know what needs to be done that next day. Paper handling is still not my strong suit.