The Calendar's Alphabet
At the start of each year I set up a new electronic journal. I keep a single file containing my electronic diary, musings, and blog writing. I'd always wanted to organize the file as a mix of date-based entries and subject entries but I didn't find the organization I liked until 2004. On the chance that my organizational insight works for someone else who thinks like I do (don't all stand up at once), here's how I do it.
Happily for my desire to smoothly mix date-based entries and subject-based entries, there are 52 weeks in the year and 24 useful letters in the alphabet, along with a couple letters at the end that are mostly crap. I start the diary out with the section for January 1st through January 15th. Then I put in a big block of the letter A, looking like so...
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Over the course of the year, here's where all the entries that seem best organized under a subject starting with the letter A get filed, naturally in alphabetical order, always with boldface subject lines to separate them from the rest of the text.
After the A's comes January 16th, running until the end of January.
The BBBBBBB's get set up next, followed by the entries that start February 1st, and so on alternating half-months and letters until XYZ get to run together after December 31st.
One advantage of the system is that previous dates aren't done and forgotten. When I page around in the journal to splice new subjects and projects in where they belong, I have to kick through date-based entries touching on topics and projects I might otherwise forget.
Stepping back for a moment, while this strikes me as a natural project, and a natural enough solution, I've never talked with anyone who does something similar. Maybe I'm organizing my thoughts differently than others choose to. Or maybe lots of people use systems something like this and it's just not a topic that comes up in conversation.
Happily for my desire to smoothly mix date-based entries and subject-based entries, there are 52 weeks in the year and 24 useful letters in the alphabet, along with a couple letters at the end that are mostly crap. I start the diary out with the section for January 1st through January 15th. Then I put in a big block of the letter A, looking like so...
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Over the course of the year, here's where all the entries that seem best organized under a subject starting with the letter A get filed, naturally in alphabetical order, always with boldface subject lines to separate them from the rest of the text.
After the A's comes January 16th, running until the end of January.
The BBBBBBB's get set up next, followed by the entries that start February 1st, and so on alternating half-months and letters until XYZ get to run together after December 31st.
One advantage of the system is that previous dates aren't done and forgotten. When I page around in the journal to splice new subjects and projects in where they belong, I have to kick through date-based entries touching on topics and projects I might otherwise forget.
Stepping back for a moment, while this strikes me as a natural project, and a natural enough solution, I've never talked with anyone who does something similar. Maybe I'm organizing my thoughts differently than others choose to. Or maybe lots of people use systems something like this and it's just not a topic that comes up in conversation.