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Comment by medler | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia has more context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickler_file

I first heard about “tickler files” in the book Getting Things Done. Didn’t realize they went back so far.

From the Wiki page, the goal of this is to organize your work in a queue based on the due date of each item. The challenge for me would be that every work item I have in home or business life needs to be done ASAP as long as the next most priority thing is either complete or blocked on something external. It's extremely rare to have a deliverable that's due next December.

I don't have many uses for my tickler file, but it's usually concert tickets, bookings and itineraries for travel etc.

After years of trying to perfect my home "office" system, I just have a 2-year stack of correspondence (electric bills and whatever) , which works out to about about a ream of paper. Upon intake I stamp the date in the upper right corner (because nobody can seem to standardize on this) and every couple of months I peel the >2yr off and shred it.

> I peel the >2yr off and shred it

Oh how I wish I had the courage to shred paperwork older than 2 years. Here are a few true examples where I'm glad I didn't shred too early:

- lifetime warranty claim on an appliance required the original receipt from 12 years ago

- needed to verify details on a lawyer's bill that arrived 4 years after the service was done

- parents' tax return from 30(!) years ago that had critical info about a capital gains issue

And let's not forget that tax records might be needed up to 3 years after filing in case of an audit (and some sources say 7 years).

I think my taxes would be the most boring audit ever, but the point is you need to have a system for indexing the stuff in case you need to find something and you need to set some kind of retention period (possibly a flexible one depending on the content) so it doesn't become a burden on your life. There's no reason I should continue to provide space in my life for a document that just says what greasy spoon restaurant and hip bookstore me and my ex visited in 2003. Maybe something more important, as you alluded to, can be moved to a different queue.

Basic usage procedure:

> Using folders, items scheduled for the current month are placed within the appropriate daily folder. Items which need to be done in a future month are placed in the corresponding monthly folder. Every day, the current daily folder is emptied and placed at the back of the set. At the start of a new month, the items for that month are removed from the month folder and placed in the corresponding daily folders.

I was more surprised that tickler files were patentable (ie not obvious) as late as the XIX!

(was correspondence low enough beforehand that they just used linear scan?)

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