MEMORY SYSTEM FOR SCHEDULES AND APPOINTMENTS.

As with telephone numbers, many people find appointments
and schedules hard to remember. They employ similar
systems for coping with their problem, the most common, of
course, being the diary. Unfortunately many people don't
always keep their diaries with them!
In this chapter I introduce two systems, the first of which is
for immediate daily use, the second for remembering schedules
and appointments for an entire week.
The first involves your basic peg systems. Simply equate the
number in your system with the hour of your appointment.
Since there are 24 hours in a day, you can either join the
shorter system together, with an appropriate total of 24, or
use the first 24 peg words in one of the larger systems.
Let us assume you have the following appointments:
7—Early morning training
10—Dentist
1—Luncheon
6—Board meeting
10—Late film
We will assume that you are using the Skipnum system to
remember these appointments. At the beginning of the day,
which in this case will certainly be no earlier than 5.30 a.m.,
you run through the list and check for words with associations.
7 a.m., represented by the word egg, is the time for your
Early Morning Group Athletic Practice. Imagine your whole
team running on eggshells, or enjoying a breakfast of egg
before or after.
At 10 a.m. (toast) you have an appointment with the dentist.
Imagine all your teeth sinking into a piece of toast which
causes pain.
Your next appointment, at 1 p.m. (13.00) is for lunch. The
key word is 'tea'. Imagine the rather depressing prospect of a
lunch at which nothing but tea is served.
At 6 p.m. you have a Board Meeting. The Skipnum memory
word for 18 (18.00 hours equals 6 p.m.) is 'tape'. The associa-
tion here is not difficult—imagine the confidential matters of
your Board Meeting being tape-recorded on an enormous
machine.
Finally you have an appointment at 10 p.m. (2200 hours) to
see a late film. The Skipnum key word is 'troop'. Imagine the
audience of which you will be a part as a well organised military
force!
The second system for remembering schedules and appoint-
ments may be used for an entire week. As with the memory
system for dates, take Sunday as day 1 of the week and
ascribe a number to each of the other days:
Sunday — 1
Monday — 2
Tuesday — 3
Wednesday— 4
Thursday — 5
Friday — 6
Saturday — 7
Having given a number to the day, we treat the hours as they
are treated in the small system discussed above, and as they
appear in railway, shipping and airline schedules. The day is
considered to have 24 hours, from 2400 (midnight) through
1 a.m. (0100), noon (1200), 1 p.m. (1300) and back to midnight
(2400).
Thus for any hour and day of the week a two- or three-digit
number is formed—day first, hour second. All that is necessary
is to transfer the number into the word of the major system
list. Having arrived at the word we link it with the appropriate
appointment.
Supposing you had an appointment to see a car you wanted
to buy at 9.00 a.m. on Tuesday. Tuesday is represented by the
number 3 which in the major system translates to the letter 'm'.
The hour, 9, translates to the letter 'b,p'. Referring to the basic
list we see that the key word for Tuesday at 9.00 a.m. is 'map'.
To remember this appointment you might imagine the car you
are going to see either bursting through a giant map, wrapped
in a giant map, or driving across a giant map.
As another example, suppose you have an appointment for
a guitar lesson at 5.00 p.m. (hour number 17) on a Thursday
(day number 5). The number we derive from Thursday at
5.00 p.m. is 517, the word for this being 'leading'. To remem-
ber this, imagine yourself leading an entire orchestra with
your solo guitar!
You may think this system a bit cumbersome, because it
requires a fairly thorough knowledge of the larger numbers in
the Major System, but this can be overcome by 'rotating' the
hours of the day to suite those hours in which you have most
appointments. If, for example, your day does not usually start
until 10.00 a.m., then 10.00 a.m. can be considered to be number
1 in your appointment memory system. In this manner the
most important and often-used hours in your day will nearly
always be represented by only 2-digit numbers, i.e. the
numbers from 10 to 100 in the Major System.