Being a professor requires you to have to sign tons and tons of forms for various people on a daily basis. On any given day I can sign my name ten times but still have difficulty remembering the date. I have four calendars in my office, and three computers that display the date in the upper right hand corner. I wish there were a way so that I would never have to forget the current date. I would save at least one and a half minutes per day if I could do it. That could easily translate to 365*1.5/60 = 9.125 hours per year—meaning I'd be getting an extra work day per year.
In 1997 I made a series of calendars for Shiseido that had a run of popularity when there were few things like it around on the web. I've dusted them off a bit and they can now be seen on my website as the top 6 links [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]. Each of these calendars provided no ability to solve my own personal problem of trying to remember today's date. However they do serve the purpose of visual entertainment in a modest way, and I never have to think about them as they are in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art thanks to then curatorial maestro Aaron Betsky.
Looking back, some of the elements are naively composed, as is often one's personal assessment when reviewing their older work. At the same time, looking at these things make me wonder, "Who made these things?" In 1997 I was just getting started setting up shop at MIT. That year was difficult for many reasons that are not at all simple, on top of the fact that the first year of starting any new job is certainly the most difficult. I think I'd like to meet myself from eight years ago to tell myself to cut down on my dangerously high caffeine addiction during that period.
Perhaps when you are running at full speed, you tend to not know what the current day is by nature of your busy-ness. Maybe the day that I finally master the art of knowing what the date is, I will know that I have finally slowed down. Good or bad? I do not know. By the way, what day is it?
Paul Waite in the UK suggests the following method for remembering today's date:
"At work, I have a little notebook. I use it exclusively to note down tasks to be done (left half of the page), and record my time on tasks (right hand side of the page). Each Monday, I make a little list of tasks to do this week. I give this a heading consisting of Monday's date, and Friday's date, like this:
14-18
+ Do this
+ Do something else
Then, each day, I can work out the date based on the day. Wednesday, it's 14 + 2. Then again, if you're not sure what day it is, this falls apart. But having 14-18 in my head all week helps me remember where I am in time."
Thanks Paul!