‘Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.’ — Oliver Burkeman
January, as the first month of the new year, is always the prime time to plan - to design - the year ahead. And sketching can be a great tool to do so.
I have always been one of those people who loves sketching Time (in plain words, planning). Sketching as a planning tool helps me design what’s next while managing what’s currently going on. I am a visual person and seeing my plans, tasks, and intentions drawn on a sketchbook, in grids and lines, helps me pay attention to what matters.
Se hace camino al andar. — Antonio Machado
Last year (2022) I read Oliver Burkeman’s book ‘Four Thousand Weeks’. Theoretically, this is a book about time management but, practically, it is a guide to being more present.
It was the chapter on attention and distraction that grabbed my interest. We talk a lot about the importance of looking harder as the very first step in drawing. Drawing and visualising time on a piece of paper is an interesting process to abstract the reality of it, be more present for a moment, and bring that attention, looking harder to a specific matter. Calendars and planners have existed since the beginning of civilisation. It seems that humans have always needed or benefited from visually representing time.
The way I do it: I draw grids, storyboards and timelines to visualise the year, months and weeks.
At the beginning of the year, I start by storyboarding the months on a double spread and visualising any aspect of my life, from trips to holidays to key dates and intentions I have already set up. I also draw the whole year as a continuous grid where I can see each day and make notes on them. On the other hand, on the busier weeks that need more attention (I am not that rigorous, I skip some weeks as I always have my yearly calendar) I storyboard that week with notes on the relevant tasks. As you can see I sketch my year at different scales, almost applying the same design principles I use as an architect.
Regardless of being a person who loves planning or not, sketching can be a great tool to organise the time past and the time ahead of you.
They say thoughts and reflections are better put into words; I say they are best put into drawing. There is something to the fact of sketching the grids of time, instead of having an already made-up planner, because there’s a bit of attention put into it and also, an awareness of the scale of time. Oliver Burkeman says in his book ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ that you cannot get hold of all your tasks ahead, that that is an impossible endeavour. But if anything, storyboarding can be a way, at least, of shifting your attention to the right things that matter to you, a way to establish priorities and visualise intentions.
I encourage you to experiment and create your own systems. Take planning the year ahead as a design exercise.
My yearly planning journal is a continuous work in progress. The best thing about using such a system is that it allows me to go back in time and review what I paid attention to at a specific moment during the year, to review my notes and re-discover ideas or events. This is an interesting process to do especially later in the year when so many months have already gone by.
Sketching is such a powerful tool for designing anything. These are other interesting resources on sketching as a planning tool:
Storyboarding. Storyboarding is a powerful tool used normally in the film industry and in graphic novels, but can also be extended to different areas - I use it a lot at work to map ideas and reports. Storyboarding is basically organising a set of images in sequence to visualise the overall of a project. This link is a nice example of the use of storyboarding in some Pixar films.
Wait But Why is a fantastic blog by Tim Urban. He uses simple sketches and humour at different timescales to reflect on those big questions about humanity. These are two of my favourite posts:
The Tail End - the human lifespan seen visually.
The Fermi Paradox - are we alone in the Universe?
The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll. I have his book in line to read in the following weeks. I heard about this method some time ago, and apparently, there is a big community that has applied and developed Carroll’s ideas into their own movement.
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Happy sketching!
Ana
Do you use any sketching or journaling tools to plan your time ahead? It would be great to hear about it! Leave a comment and share your thoughts :)
📝 Sketching the New Year
Thank you for this post! I love the idea of connecting sketching, time and planning (also I love the Leuchtturm sketchbooks!)
One technique I use at present is drawing a free form mind map (like Austin Kleon’s) to assess themes in my art practice, and what possibilities/obstacles are next. Maybe I will experiment with this as a planning tool, and try out different time scales.
These are great. I used to do a daily quick sketch of my favourite moment of the day in my planner. Looking back on those brings the memory back immediately and much more vividly than words could have done.