Eating my own dogfood

A MonkeyGTD tale of ticklers and contacts...

My motorcycle is at the shop. It's getting a reconditioned rear shock absorber. They said it would be 10-12 days. So when I dropped it in I added a tickler to my "Bike rear shock" project called "Bike should be ready by now" and set the date to 12 days later. I created a new Contact and put the phone number of the mechanic in the text of the contact. Then I associated the Contact with the Tickler. The tickler fired on Wednesday I think. It was flashing at me. I converted it to an Action using the new "make action" button. I gave it a context of @Call. I didn't do it straight away. So it sat there as a Next Action until this morning when I decided to make some @Calls. I click the >> link next to the Contact selector, dialed the number and found out the shock absorber was done and they'd be putting it all back together next week. I converted the
"should be ready by now" Action back to a tickler and set the date to Tuesday. The End.

So, the point of this story is that Ticklers are nice! By converting something to a tickler you get it out of your mind and off your lists. In the above story my mind is free from wondering if and when and if I should call the mechanic's.

You can also convert Projects to ticklers. (Though it might get a little strange if the project already had actions in it). But if you've got a Someday/Maybe project that is not relevant until after a certain date then try converting it to a tickler and giving it a date. This will stop it cluttering your Projects Dashboard. If you want you could put a 'note' in the text of the tiddler to remind you that it's supposed to be converted back to a project when the time comes.