September, 2008 | Legacy Development

Daily Mapping

For me, mapping is a part of my life everyday. I make a map first thing to plan out my day. It takes the form of a map with a date and day heading and a timeline with the hours spread across the map at the bottom. I then plug in the things that I hope to accomplish and appointments and use the timeline to report when those things happen. The next day, I might go back and fill in the times for things when they actually happened (if they weren’t appointments or set times). That way, I see how my time was spent, and I can, perhaps, anticipate what my day might be like (over-booked, extra time…). I find that the act of creating this first map (the system was developed by Vanda North a few years ago) helps focus me, and the soothing nature of creating the map begins my day in a gentle way. Here are two images: The first is a map from yesterday that I completed this morning by plugging in the actual times for the branches on the map. The second is today’s map made first thing. As you can see, I have only “ideas” of things to do, but they haven’t occurred yet, so the timeline is largely unfilled.