We were talking about time zones and how we remember them, I attempted to jot down how I remember them and what I remember.

Basically I just remember the ones I use regularly which is East Asia (ex. Japan), Europe, UK, Eastern USA and Western USA. The rest I can probably have a rough guess at, certainly enough to know whether I’m going to wake someone up in the middle of the night or not.

The way I remember them is as a series of time differences, Asia to Europe, Europe to UK, etc. The result is that only four time differences need to be remembered for my five important time zones but a further eighteen can be derived. Of course, you have to remember to add one during winter for everywhere except Asia.
The diagram that I jotted down looked something like this…

How do you remember time zones?
Would this help?

A visual quick reference for moving around a buffer in Emacs.

Coincidentally both in my J-O-B and for a personal project I’ve been doing a little bit of development again recently. I’m not a software developer and spent only a year at the very begining of my career being one. I’m very much the hobyist here so it’s both fun and frustrating to pick it up again.

One of the minor irritations each time is how much EMACS I’ve forgotten. I’m still in the process of reading ‘The Back of the Napkin’ but this seemed like an opportunity to put my new ‘visual thinking’ skills to the test and see if I could make some EMACS commands stick in my swiss-cheese brain.

I’ve just started reading The Back of the Napkin which is apparently about Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, I’m interested in how this can improve my effectiveness so before I get too far with the book I thought it might be worth documenting what I have so far. Basically a personal short hand for taking notes. Not exactly a visual vocabulary for sure but it will be interesting to contrast this with where I end up after reading the book.

Like most people, this has evolved over time for taking notes in meetings, training, when reading, etc. I first noted this down when I covered it in some training I did on effective meetings a long time ago. The image below shows the key aspects of my key for note taking, mostly applicable to meetings. The key objective, of course, is to make sure I end up with a record of who, will do what, by when and also note informational items. All done in such a way that it’s easily extracted later (consistency being key here).

The key then looks like this…

An example of this in use might look like this…