Keeping Records with Memory Difficulties

I've recently started keeping tabs on job seeking and my investigations into Marketing and PR as a line of future work. Back in 2007, before I got my current job, I was doing this using Excel, but I remember having distinct problems with this.

At the time, my Excel spreadsheet covered dates, company names, contact names, and other details. This was a searchable list that allowed me to check who I'd contacted and what I needed to follow up. There was one problem, though: when it came to printing the document, the info spread to 3 landscape pages, which sort-of looked better in portrait, only the document wouldn't convert to a decent printable form.

When it came to printing, my computer would only give me the second page. So I was going to the job centre, sometimes to sign on, sometimes to sign off after finding some short term work, sometimes to sign back on again. When I presented the jobseeking record I'd claimed I'd made, I only had old information that they'd already seen. They had to take my word that there were more records at home, and that I had in fact been looking for work since I last met them.

More recently, my DLA has been scrapped and a meagre PIP allocation has been put in its place, plus my Working Tax Credits were stopped for an issue that's still debatable and under review with Citizen's Advice, and I've subsequently been lumped with a £400 bill (which I still haven't paid). I've decided it's time to purposefully look for work again.

This time, however, I've made a table in Word, made it landscape and given it 3 headings.

Date

Organisation

Details

Here I can detail when I made an inquiry, who this was with (a business or public body) and what was discussed. In a day off, I might visit an organisation, talk to a manager or advisor and make notes on our conversations. Once home I'll then type up any notes straight onto this form, taking only a couple of minutes from my day.

This then means that whenever a further meeting occurs with any employment advisors (for example Get Oldham Working is a department of the local authority that I'm currently meeting with), I can print off the relevant pages (whatever was put in after the last meeting), and show them exactly what I've done. There's no need to try to recall anything or root through diaries to see where I was on certain days.

It's a fairly straightforward method of keeping a track of what goes on in your life. It could be that, for yourself, job seeking isn't what's filling up your time but meetings with the NHS (particularly if you've recently had an acquired brain injury). It takes a little time to transfer notes from paper to computer, but unless you're carrying a very fast-loading laptop around with you wherever you go, you can't have everything 100% digital. But then, that's why I tried to learn shorthand- so that I could take quicker notes and could ask more questions in what little time public services, like doctors surgeries, would give me.

So, Word, not Excel, for keeping written records, is always much more beneficial.