Plan your year with Chronodex by Scription

If you haven't bought a new diary for 2012, then Chronodex by Scription is worth a look before you do. This is a printable PDF designed to be bound into book form. What makes Chronodex notable is the way that the week pages are laid out.

Rather than arrange days as a plain table with rows for time slots, Chronodex displays each day a circle with sections for time, like using a pie chart. The sections correspond with the positions on a clock and the day runs from 9am to 9pm.

Events can then be marked by drawing around the correct times. There is plenty of space around each day describe events and to add other information and tasks for the day.

Each week is shown on double-page spread along with a two-month calendar and space to write about the weekend.

The Chronodex PDF is produced so that it is ready to be printed double sided as a booklet. This makes it easier to use once finished by double-sided printing can often be a little tricky if your printer doesn't have a duplex unit to do so automatically. There are some comprehensive instructions on the Scription blog, some of the most helpful we've seen in fact, but we'd recommend printing a few pages as draft first to make sure the paper is going into the printer correctly.

The blog also includes instructions on how to bind the diary. It's quite involved but the diary is too thick for most staplers. Our test diary stayed together quite well with a big elastic band.

Instructions for using the diary are included in the margins of the PDF on every page. The idea is that these are cut off for the finished diary. We would probably prefered to have seen the instructions on their own page with the extra space used for the daily diary. There are various of the diary on the Scription blog so these might appear in time.

We think that Chronodex is a clever take on the traditional diary and worth a go, especially if you tend to think visually rather than in lists.