In October 2026, a ballot arrived in my mailbox in Victoria, British Columbia, with five decisions on it. A mayor. Up to eight councillors. Two school trustees. Regional district directors. And a yes-or-no question about whether my city should look into merging with the one next door. Somewhere behind each name was a set of campaign promises, and I couldn’t have told you one of them.
Seven days after that one was due, the whole province voted again, and a second envelope showed up before I’d finished thinking about the first. The premier (our province’s version of a governor) had called a snap election, mid-trade war, a week after every municipality in the province had just finished its own. So in the space of eight days I was asked to form an opinion on roughly thirty people and one constitutional question, most of whom I had never heard of in September.
I know how most people around me handled it, because I asked. Some tuned the whole thing out. Some read the candidate profiles the night before and voted on whoever sounded reasonable. And a few went all in: every forum, every mailer, every group chat, a month of running hot on it, followed by a vow to never pay attention to politics again. All three of those are understandable. All three of them are also why the next election will feel exactly the same.
What your accountant already knows
I did something different this time, and I want to write it down while it’s fresh, partly so you can use it and partly so I can be held to it. It took me about an evening to set up and will take me about an hour a month to keep. It isn’t clever. It’s the thing your accountant has been telling you about taxes for years.
Nobody enjoys doing their taxes. But there are two kinds of people in April. One of them has a folder they’ve been dropping receipts into all year. They sit down, it takes an afternoon, and they get on with their life. The other one has a shoebox, or worse, a vague memory of a shoebox, and April is a small disaster they swear won’t happen again. The difference between those two people isn’t how much they care about taxes. It’s when they do the work.
Elections are the same. The campaign is filing season. The years in between are when you either keep receipts or don’t. This piece is about keeping receipts.
It doesn’t matter where you live or which election you’re facing. Town council, school board, state or provincial legislature, national parliament or congress. The titles change and the machinery differs. The practice doesn’t.
I should say up front what I’m not claiming. I’ve done exactly one cycle of this. I’m writing from the first month of a four-year term, with a tracker that has nothing checked off yet. I don’t know whether it works over a whole term. That’s part of why I’m writing it down now, where you can check my work later.
Why elections wear us out
The problem isn’t that democracy asks too much of us. It’s that it asks for all of it in the same three weeks.
The actual work of being an informed voter is small. Know what the issues are, what was promised, and know whether it got done. That’s it. If you spread that over a term, it fits in the margins of a life. It only feels enormous because we put all of it off until the campaign, which is the one moment when every candidate, every outlet and every neighbor is competing for the same sliver of your attention.
And the campaign is designed to be loud. It has to be. Lawn signs, debates, mailers, polling, attack ads, the forum at the community center. None of that is built to help you evaluate anything calmly. It’s built to win. Walking into it unprepared and expecting to come out with a considered opinion is like walking into a casino and expecting to come out with a budget.
So people do one of three things.
Skip, cram, or burn out.
They skip it. Turnout in local elections is routinely under a third of eligible voters, and I don’t think that’s because two thirds of people don’t care. It’s because the cost of catching up feels too high, so they don’t start.
They cram. The night before, the candidate profiles, a decision made mostly on name recognition and whoever seemed least annoying. Then a faint feeling of shame afterward, whether you were walking out of a polling station or licking an envelope.
Or they burn out. They go all in for a month, run on outrage, and then tune out until the next one because the campaign used up everything they had. This is the one that looks like engagement and isn’t. It’s the all-nighter version of studying. It produces a vote, the same way an all-nighter produces an exam, and then it produces nothing until the next panic.
I’ve done all three. The third one is the trap I fall into most, because it feels like caring. But concentrated effort isn’t the same as sustained effort, and attention spent in a panic doesn’t build on itself. A crash diet isn’t eating well. A month of fury isn’t citizenship.
The alternative isn’t caring less. It’s spreading the caring out.
The idea: keep receipts on campaign promises
A vote is a decision you make once. Accountability is a relationship you keep over time. If you only show up for the decision, you’re not in the relationship, and you’ll make the next decision the same way you made the last one: without much to go on.
So here’s the reframe. An election isn’t a one-day event. It’s the start of a term in which specific people made specific promises to you. Those promises are the receipts. Keep them.
There are two layers to keep receipts on, and they need slightly different handling.
The first is your representatives. Your city councillor, your state or provincial representative, your member of parliament or congress, your school board trustee. These are people you can actually write to, meet for coffee, and expect a reply from. The relationship is personal and the asks are specific. This is where most of the practice lives.
The second is the leaders. The mayor, the governor or premier, the prime minister or president, the party platform. You’ll get form replies from these people, if you get any reply at all. That’s fine. The point isn’t to be heard by them. The point is to keep a record that your representative can use, and that you can use when the next ballot shows up.
The practice, in one sentence: write down what they told you, check it on a schedule, and write back when something moves.
That’s the whole thing. Everything else in this piece is about making it small enough to keep.
A note on where to start.
So… where do you start? If an election is days away as you read this, start at Step 1 and don’t worry about catching up on anything else. If one just ended, start at Step 2. Somewhere in the middle of a term? Start at Step 3 with whatever you can remember being promised. There’s no wrong entry point. The only wrong move is waiting for the next campaign.
One caution before we get into the steps, because it matters more than any of them. This is not about catching people out. Some promises get broken for good reasons. Some get delayed by things nobody could have predicted. A tracker that only counts failures turns you into a crank, and cranks get filtered. So track the kept promises too, and say thank you when they land. When I wrote to the new premier of my province, a man whose party I didn’t vote for, I told him I’d write again when promises were kept and when they weren’t. I meant both halves.
If you take one thing from this piece, take that sentence. The rest is logistics.
Step 1 — During the campaign: ask everyone the same questions
The most useful thing you can do during a campaign is also the least time-consuming. Send every candidate the same short list of questions, and keep their answers.
I did this for council, mayor, school trustees and the people running to represent my district in the provincial legislature. It works the same for a state house, a county board or a federal seat. It took one evening to set up and about ten minutes a day to maintain. Here’s how.
1. Pick your issues before you read a single platform.
This is the step people skip, and it’s the one that keeps the campaign from setting your agenda. Before you look at who’s running, write down the three to seven things you actually care about in your town or your province. Not the things you’re supposed to care about. The things that affect your week.
Mine, this time, were: how the city balances bike lanes against traffic flow, parking on residential streets, who shows up when someone is having a mental health crisis, homelessness and where supportive housing goes, whether rental rules treat a homeowner with a basement suite the same as an investor with six condos, and whether councillors vote as a bloc or as individuals. For school trustees I added two more: what guardrails exist around police officers in schools, and how the district handles AI in classrooms.
Yours will be different. That’s the point. Write them down somewhere you’ll find them again, because you’ll use the same list next time.
2. Turn them into questions a candidate can answer in a paragraph.
Not “what’s your position on housing” but “would you support rules that treat a homeowner renting a suite differently from an investor renting a portfolio, and why?” Specific questions get specific answers. Vague ones get the brochure.
3. Write one email and send it to everyone.
Same questions, same wording, every candidate in the race. Put them all in BCC so they can’t see each other’s addresses. Ask for a reply by email rather than through a web form, because you want the answer in your inbox where you can file it. Keep the whole thing under 300 words. Here’s the one I’d send today, which you can copy, fill in, and use:
Subject: Three questions before I vote
Hi [Candidate name],
I live in [neighbourhood or district] and I'm sending the same questions to every candidate in this race. Short answers are fine. I'll keep your reply and check back once the term is underway.
1. [Issue one]: What specifically would you do about this in your first year?
2. [Issue two]: Where do you stand, and what would change your mind?
3. [Issue three]: Is there a decision from the last term you'd have made differently?
Thank you for running. It's not a small thing to do.
[Your name]
[Your street or neighbourhood]That last line matters. People running for local office are mostly doing it on their own time and their own dime. Being decent to them costs nothing and gets you better answers.
4. Let the answers sort the candidates.
You’ll get four kinds of reply. Full and specific. Short but clear. Vague. Nothing. Each one tells you something. I ended up with a plain grid: yes, likely yes, maybe, no. The candidates with the most complete answers rose. Curt answers that still landed where I needed them counted. Silence didn’t, and I noticed that two of the candidates who never replied were also the ones whose campaigns talked most about listening.
5. Meet the ones you can.
If a candidate offers coffee, take it. I sat down with two, including the man running for mayor who came second. A written answer becomes a commitment when you’ve heard someone say it to your face, and you can quote it back later. I didn’t clear my calendar for these. I fit them around things I was already doing.
6. Stay open to changing your mind.
Halfway through the campaign I had a conversation with someone who’d had a frightening experience with police during a mental health crisis. It moved my position on police officers in schools from a flat yes to a yes with hard conditions: trauma-informed training, no weapons, no one-on-one contact with students. I wrote to the trustee candidates and told them my view had shifted and why. This is the part of the practice that keeps it honest. A tracker is only useful if you’re willing to be tracked too.
7. Decide on your own terms.
Have some way of deciding that isn’t “whoever annoyed me least this week.” I run big decisions through a lens I use for everything else in my life, and I used it for the provincial vote and the amalgamation question. You don’t need mine. You need one. Even “which of my seven issues does this person agree with me on” is a method, and it beats vibes.
8. Know what your vote can and can’t do.
In 2022, the eighth and final seat on my city council was decided by 67 votes. In local races your vote is often closer to pivotal than you think, and in a race with multiple seats, the real question is which of your preferred candidates needs it most. Ten minutes with the last election’s results will tell you more than any poll.
What this cost me
One evening to write the questions and send them. Ten to fifteen minutes a day reading replies and dropping them in a folder. Two coffees. One evening to decide. Call it six to eight hours across a three-week campaign, most of it reading things I’d have read anyway, just with a purpose this time.
Step 2 — The week after: write down the campaign promises
The week after an election is the one week nobody wants to think about politics. It’s also the only week that matters. Everything the winners told you is still fresh, their inboxes are still open, and the term hasn’t started. Spend two hours here and the rest of the term gets easier.
1. Separate the winners from the rest.
Of the seven council candidates I voted for, four won. One lost the last seat by 20 votes. The losers’ answers go in a folder, in case they run again. The winners’ answers become the tracker.
2. Turn each promise into a dated check.
This is the move that makes the whole thing work. Not “he said he’d push for civilian crisis teams” but:
- December: did he raise it with the police chief, like he said he would?
- February: is it funded in the 2027 budget?
Specific promises get the date they’d naturally come due. Budget season. A vote on a corridor. The first session of a new legislature. Vague promises get a vague date: one year out. The tracker doesn’t need to be clever. It needs a date on every line.
Here’s what one line looks like. You’ll want one of these per promise:
| Who | What they told me (their words) | Check on | Status | Where I saved it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Councillor [name] | “I’ll raise civilian crisis teams with the chief before the budget” | December 2026 | In progress | [link or folder] |
| Party leader / platform | “$1,000 a year in income tax relief” | First budget after the election | Silent | [link to platform] |
Four statuses, and only four: kept, in progress, broken, silent. You’ll see why in Step 3.
3. Do the same for the leaders.
For the new provincial government (do the same for a new state, federal or national one), I took the platform promises and made a list: the income tax cut, the increase to disability assistance, the bump to the family benefit, the surgical wait-time guarantee, the housing commitments, the pledge to never raise taxes, and two repeals I was watching more closely than anything else. Each got a check-in date tied to when it would actually show up, which for most of them is the first budget.
I didn’t vote for this government. That’s exactly why the list matters. If you only track the people you voted for, you’re not keeping receipts, you’re keeping score.
4. Send the first letter now.
To the winners you wrote to during the campaign: congratulations, here’s what you told me, here’s when I’ll be checking. To the leader: congratulations, here are your promises in my own words, I’ll write when they’re kept and when they’re not. And to your own representative, if they’re in opposition: here’s what I sent the leader, please track it from your side.
The one I sent to the premier opened with a sentence I’d recommend to anyone: I didn’t vote for your party, but you are my premier now, and I take that seriously enough to write. It’s not hostile. It’s not fawning. It tells them you’ll still be here in year three.
This letter does two things. It puts them on notice, gently. And it gives you a record you can quote from later. Here’s a version you can copy:
Subject: What you told me, and when I'll check
Hi [Name],
Congratulations on [winning your seat / forming government]. I wrote to you during the campaign about [issue], and you told me: "[their words]."
I've written that down, along with [one or two other things they said], and I'll be checking in on it around [month]. I'll write when it's done and I'll write if it stalls. Either way, you'll hear from me, and so will [your other representative / the local paper, if you mean it].
Thanks for taking the job on.
[Your name]
[Neighbourhood or district]5. Decide what you won’t do.
The week after is also when the outrage machine is loudest. In my city, old social media posts from a newly elected councillor surfaced within days, and a petition demanding her resignation was circulating before she’d been sworn in. I didn’t sign it. I decided to wait for her response, and then for her voting record, and to ask her a direct question once she was in the chair. That’s not me being soft on her. It’s me choosing the whole-term view over the four-day one, which is the whole point of the practice.
6. Park the ideas.
You’ll come out of a campaign with ideas. Mine was that candidates should be required to list their social media handles on campaign materials, so voters can see what they actually say when they think nobody important is reading. Good idea. Not a week-after idea. It went into a task dated for the spring, when council is settled and I’m not running on fumes.
What this cost me
One hour to build the tracker. One hour to write and send the letters. Two hours, once.
Step 3 — The term: become a Clockwork Citizen
This is the whole practice. A fixed rhythm, about an hour a month in whatever pieces you’ll actually keep, with a short menu of things you might do in it. It’s not a commitment to care more. It’s a commitment to care on schedule.
I’m calling it being a Clockwork Citizen, and I mean clockwork the way your grandmother meant it: dependable, regular, runs whether or not anyone’s watching. Not clockwork in the Burgess sense. Nobody’s conditioning you. You’re the one winding it.
1. Pick your rhythm.
An hour a month will look like a lot to some people, even though the math is tiny. So here’s the same hour in three shapes. Pick the one that feels right, not the one that sounds most impressive.
- One hour, once a month.
- Fifteen minutes, once a week.
- One 25-minute block, every two weeks.
Same total. Different feel. Anyone who’s tried to get fit knows that fifteen minutes most days and one hour on Sunday are not the same practice, even when the minutes add up the same, and that most people stick with the smaller, more frequent one. The weekly version has a real advantage for this work: it catches things while they’re fresh, like a council vote or a bill tabled on Tuesday, and it keeps the follow-up letter short. The monthly version is easier to protect. The two-week block is the honest middle.
I chose the monthly hour, on the first Saturday, because that’s a day I already use for tending things rather than making things. That’s a preference, not a prescription. What matters is that the rhythm is yours, and that it’s on the calendar rather than in your intentions.
A recurring event or reminder, with this in the notes field. Copy it as is:
Clockwork Citizen — pick ONE:
* skim the next agenda (council, school board, legislature, whichever you're tracking)
* check one promise in the tracker (kept / in progress / broken / silent) and note the source
* send one email
* note one neighbourhood issue for the residents' association
Then stop.The menu is the trick. Without it, the reminder goes off and you stare at it. With it, you pick one line and start. On a good day you’ll do two. On most days one is enough.
3. Learn the shape of a term.
Some sessions are empty and you end early. Some months there’s a budget. The year isn’t flat, and once you know its shape you can relax in the quiet parts. Roughly:
Budget season (every government has one; find out when yours lands, because that date matters more than election day) is the one time of year worth stepping up. This is where most promises either get funded or quietly don’t. Cities usually run a public consultation; submit something, even three sentences. Read the provincial or state budget coverage against your list.
The first session of a new legislature, congress or council is when a new government’s headline bills land. If a party promised to repeal something or build something in its first hundred days, this is where you find out.
The quiet middle (summer): check nothing. Let the session be a walk past the thing they said they’d fix.
Anniversaries: one year in, check the slower promises. Housing units. Services moved. The things that take a year to become visible.
4. Keep score honestly.
Four statuses, not two. Kept. In progress. Broken. Silent.
“In progress” is where most things live for most of a term. If you treat that as failure, you’ll be furious by month six and done by month nine. Give things time. “Silent” is its own category because it’s the most common one and the most useful: a promise nobody’s mentioned since the campaign is worth a polite nudge, not an accusation.
5. Write back when something moves.
When a check turns something up, write. Short. Specific. Quote their own words back to them. Here’s the shape:
Subject: Following up on what you said about [issue]
Hi [Name],
During the campaign you told me: "[their words]."
[If kept:] I noticed [what happened]. Thank you. I wanted you to know someone was watching for it.
[If broken or stalled:] As of [date], [what happened instead]. What changed, and what's the plan now?
[If silent:] I haven't seen anything on this since [month]. Is it still on the list?
I'll check again in [month].
[Your name]
[Neighbourhood or district]If you wrote to a leader, send a copy to your own representative so the record lives in two places. In my case the premier’s office will send me a form reply and my local representative, who sits in opposition, will actually read it. Both are fine. The letter isn’t for them. It’s for the file.
6. Watch the one thing that predicts the rest.
Every term has a leading indicator. For a new government, it’s whether the leader survives the first budget. For a council, it’s whether the voting bloc holds. Those two things will tell you more about the next three years than any single promise, so give them one line in the tracker and check it when budget season ends.
7. Guard the cadence.
When something enrages you mid-month, write it in the tracker and wait for the next session. The practice is the container. If the outrage doesn’t survive until then, it wasn’t worth an email. If it does, you’ll write a better one.
8. Go a little closer, carefully.
If you want more than the tracker, there are three doors that don’t require running for anything: your residents’ or neighbourhood association, your school’s parent advisory council, and your city’s advisory committees, most of which take applications from ordinary residents. Pick one. Not three. The test I’m using for myself is whether my actual working experience is something the table needs. If it is, I’ll apply. If it isn’t, the tracker is enough, and I’d rather be a reliable citizen than a tired one.
What this costs
Twelve hours a year, plus a bit extra in budget season. That’s fewer hours than most people spend complaining about the results.
Step 4 — The next election: read your own file
By the time the next ballot comes around, you won’t be researching candidates. You’ll be reading your own file.
Here’s what you’ll already have. Every incumbent’s answers to your questions from last time, plus a few years of kept, in progress, broken and silent beside them. Every challenger who lost last time, with their answers, in case they run again. Your own list of issues, already written, needing only a once-over. And a working knowledge of how the machinery runs: when budgets land, who actually decides the thing you care about, and which promises were never in a councillor’s power to keep in the first place.
So the campaign changes jobs. Instead of three weeks of discovery, it’s three weeks of confirmation. You ask the incumbents one new question (what changed your mind this term?). Send the newcomers the original set. Finally, check whether anyone’s answers contradict their record. Most of your decisions are made before the campaign even starts, and the campaign noise becomes something you can watch with mild interest instead of dread.
Confidence, then competence
That’s the confidence part. Not confidence that you’ll pick winners. I picked four out of seven, and one of my losses was by 20 votes. Confidence that your vote is yours, built from what people did rather than what they said in the last three weeks. Cramming can never give you that, no matter how well you cram.
The competence part is quieter. After a term of this you’ll know which level of government runs the thing you care about, which means you’ll stop blaming the wrong people, which means your letters will land with the right ones. That alone would be worth the twelve hours.
Add it up. The first campaign, six to eight hours. The week after, two. The term, twelve a year. The next campaign, maybe three. Call it sixty hours over a four-year term, and less where terms are shorter. Most people spend more than that on a single season of a show they don’t even like.
And the open question, which I’ll answer after the next election: does a record change how you vote, or only how you feel about voting? I don’t know yet. I suspect the second one matters more than I think.
The tool doesn’t matter. What matters is that the check-in arrives without you having to remember it. Use the thing that already interrupts you.
The minimum: Reminders on your phone. One recurring reminder called Clockwork Citizen, at whatever rhythm you picked, with the menu pasted into the notes. A second list called “They said,” with one item per promise and a date on each. That’s the whole system for most people, and it’s enough. I’m not being modest on its behalf. It is enough.
One step up: a task manager.
This is what I built in Todoist (as showcased in the Civic Engagement image I shared earlier in this piece), and it would work the same in anything with recurring tasks and subtasks:
- A project called Civic Engagement.
- One recurring task for the session, with the menu in its description.
- A parent task called Promise Tracker that never gets completed, with one dated subtask per promise. Each subtask has the promise, in their words, and a note on what to look at and where.
- A few one-off tasks: budget input in January, look into one committee in February, the spring idea I parked.
When a subtask comes due, I check, update the status, and either reschedule it or close it. That’s the entire workflow.
A folder for the paper trail.
Every candidate reply, every letter I sent, every reply I got, in one place. For me it’s an email label. For you it might be a notes app or an actual folder in a drawer. The tracker tells you when to look. The folder is what you look at. This is the receipts box.
A short note per person.
When something moves, three lines: date, what I checked, what I found, link. In year three this note is worth more than any news coverage, because it’s about the thing I asked, not the thing that made headlines.
A word on AI.
You’ll notice tools like Gemini sitting on top of search now, and I used AI this cycle for the dull parts: pulling a full candidate list, finding the one article that laid out every party’s promises side by side, drafting a first version of a letter I then rewrote in my own words. It’s good at that. It’s not good at deciding, and it shouldn’t be. The questions you ask, the issues you care about, and whether a kept promise is actually good enough are yours. If you let a tool pick your issues, you’ve just outsourced the only part of this that was ever yours.
The anti-pattern.
Building a civic dashboard. Color-coded spreadsheets, a Notion workspace with a timeline view, a newsletter about your newsletter. If the setup takes longer than your first session, it’s a hobby, not a practice. Hobbies are fine. This isn’t one.
What this is not
The practice fails in two directions. It fades into nothing, or it swells into an identity. Most of these guardrails are about the second one.
It is not a news habit. You don’t need to follow council daily to check a promise once a quarter. The practice replaces the doomscroll. It doesn’t add to it.
It is not a grudge. Four statuses, and “in progress” is the normal one. If every line in your tracker says “broken,” the problem might be the tracker.
It is not a campaign. The session is the session. It doesn’t grow to fit the news. When something urgent lands between sessions, it goes in the tracker and waits. Petitions, pile-ons and resignation demands are almost always worse on day two than on day thirty.
It is not a side career. Committee work, the residents’ association, the parent council: one at most, where your experience actually helps, and weigh the time before you say yes. If it doesn’t fit, the cadence is enough.
It is not partisan. I’m tracking a government I didn’t vote for and a council I half-voted for. The practice works the same either way, and it only works if it does.
It is not a performance. You write to them. You don’t post the letters. The record is for you and for them, not for an audience. This piece is the exception, and it’s about the practice, not the names.
When to skip a beat.
And there’s a signal to stop. If the cadence starts to feel like a burden rather than a container, skip a beat. The tracker will still be there. That’s the point of writing it down.
The questions I’m still carrying
A how-to that doesn’t leave you with questions is a recipe. This isn’t one. Here are the ones I’m taking into the rest of this term.
What do we actually owe the people we elect? Attention? Patience? A fair hearing when they change course?
Is a kept promise always a good thing? I’m tracking a government whose promises, kept, would worry me more than some of them broken. What does accountability mean when you were hoping they’d fail?
When does watching become something else? At what point is a monthly letter accountability, and at what point is it noise in an inbox with four thousand other constituents in it?
What is the campaign for, if the real work happens in the term? Maybe it’s a hiring interview, and we’ve been treating it like the job.
And the one that isn’t about elections at all: what’s the right amount of attention to give something that matters but that you can’t control?
I don’t have answers. I have a tracker and a date on the calendar. That’s going to have to do for now.
Closing
This was never a productivity trick. It’s what effectiveness looks like when you stop confusing it with efficiency. Doing the civic thing well, not doing it fast, and not doing it all at once.
Back to the shoebox. The person who files calmly in April didn’t work harder than the person who panicked. They worked earlier, in smaller pieces, and then they stopped thinking about it. That’s the whole offer here. Not more caring. Earlier caring, in smaller pieces, on a schedule you’ll keep.
Here’s where I am: one election cycle in, one month into a four-year term, a tracker with nothing checked off. I’m not reporting results. I’m reporting the setup, in public, so the results can be checked against it later. If the next election comes around and I’ve let it lapse, say so. That’s what the piece is for.
And if you want to try it, keep it small. Pick one race you voted in. Find one thing the winner said. Write it down with a date. Put one short block on the calendar. That’s the practice. Everything else in here is optional.
When the next ballot arrives, you’ll either have a record or a shoebox. Either way, you’ll vote. The question is which version of you shows up.
Copy-and-paste kit
Everything above, stripped down to the four things you’ll actually reuse. Each one fits on a phone screen.
1. The candidate email (send once, to everyone, BCC)
Subject: Three questions before I vote
Hi [Candidate name],
I live in [neighbourhood or district] and I'm sending the same questions to every candidate in this race. Short answers are fine. I'll keep your reply and check back once the term is underway.
1. [Issue one]: What specifically would you do about this in your first year?
2. [Issue two]: Where do you stand, and what would change your mind?
3. [Issue three]: Is there a decision from the last term you'd have made differently?
Thank you for running. It's not a small thing to do.
[Your name]
[Your street or neighbourhood]2. The tracker (one row per promise)
| Who | What they told me (their words) | Check on | Status | Where I saved it |
Statuses: kept · in progress · broken · silent. Reschedule rather than delete.
3. The follow-up letter (one per check that moves)
Subject: Following up on what you said about [issue]
Hi [Name],
During the campaign you told me: "[their words]."
[Kept:] I noticed [what happened]. Thank you. I wanted you to know someone was watching for it.
[Broken or stalled:] As of [date], [what happened instead]. What changed, and what's the plan now?
[Silent:] I haven't seen anything on this since [month]. Is it still on the list?
I'll check again in [month].
[Your name]
[Neighbourhood or district]4. The reminder (paste into the notes of a recurring reminder)
Clockwork Citizen — pick ONE:
* skim the next agenda (council, school board, legislature, whichever you're tracking)
* check one promise in the tracker (kept / in progress / broken / silent) and note the source
* send one email
* note one neighbourhood issue for the residents' association
Then stop.Set it to repeat monthly, weekly, or every two weeks. Whichever one you’ll keep.
