I’m a visual person - it helps me to see things laid out visually (either via doodle or diagram or otherwise) to see how they relate or work, or to help me think things through. It also helps me to remember things - my visual memory remembers the way things are laid out on a page or a screen (or a table) which means I’m terribly good at pelmanism and Kim’s game, and while if I write down your phone number, I probably won’t remember it, but if you write it down, I probably will.

I’ve written here before, years ago, about the effects of having a visual memory:

When I was studying for my finals in uni, I realised that the best way for me to remember key things like dates, quotes, definitions and key translations was to remember them visually. I would draw up elaborate A3 sheets in coloured pen, with words and paragraphs and numbers written in different colours, or underlined, or at a weird angle, or next to a doodle of a tree.

Sometimes I would get other people to write things for me - my flatmate, boyfriend, neighbour. My landlord even wrote something once when he came around to collect the rent: in brown pen on the top right hand corner of a sheet - Banisteriopsis, the latin name of the most widely-used hallucinogen in the Amazon. I still remember it now.

I remember because after writing the sheets, I would tape them over my windows, and then sit at my desk and stare at them. I would memorise the relationships of the objects, the way they were written, and then later, in the exam, I would be able to re-draw them in my mind.

So anyone who’s ever worked with me will probably concur that I think best with a whiteboard marker in my hand, and that the notepad I bring into meetings isn’t for taking notes but for sketching conceptual maps or doodling circles and arrows and venn diagrams to illustrate my points.

And as with ideas, so with time.

One thing I’ve always found annoying about the increasing digitisation of my life is that most electronic time planners and calendars only cover specific periods - a day, a week, a month - and as a result it’s hard to get an accurate picture of what “the next few weeks” looks like, at a glance. It becomes all-too easy to agree to various things months in advance only to discover that they’re happening all within the same week of each other, because “October” seems like an age away. And it’s difficult to tell, as a couple, when our various independent and joint social, administrative and work commitments overlap and where they clear away to leave a magical, marvellous week free in which we might be able to take a holiday.

With this all in mind, earlier this year I grew very frustrated with trying to find increasingly sophisticated ways to synchronise my work calendar with my personal one, and all of that with P’s planner, all overlaid with other interesting things which are going on but which aren’t specific commitments (e.g. exhibitions ending), in a way which would make sense to the visual, information retrieving bit of my brain.

So I went old school. I made a powerpoint template calendar, and printed out a few months in advance, and stuck the pages in a long line on the wall of the kitchen and the wall of my office. I then scribble in the big things - the awaydays and conferences and speaking engagements and days off and days in transit to elsewhere, plus on the one at home, the various BBQs, parties and cat-sitting commitments we’ve taken on, plus things like the fact that we need to get the MOT done at some point before the end of June.

Not very hi-tech, but it works surprisingly well to give the coming weeks and months (especially the latter) shape in my mind.

In case you have the same problem, here’s the ppt file which goes through to 2010 (which is how far my current commitments stretch, rather incredibly). There are, of course, sites which do this for you, and undoubtedly a host of cleverer solutions. However, this is the one which has worked for me…

Powerpoint calendar (month by month)