Ideas to help manage time, appointments and bills with BI toolkit
As 2025 starts to become a distant memory and the requests and appointments of 2026 start to loom larger, we want to help you support those living with brain injury in your life. For many people living with brain injury, keeping appointments, time scheduling and paying bills on time can be difficult due to changes in their memory. As a support person, you can help best by combining consistent routines, external memory aids, and collaborative planning so the person witha brain injury feels more independent rather than “managed.”
Understand the planning challenges.
Many people living with brain injury experience executive function changes that affect initiation, planning, prioritising, time estimation and switching between tasks, which makes traditional diaries or “just remember” speech and systems unreliable.
Fatigue and slower processing mean they may need more time to absorb information and plan, and are more often successful if appointments happen at their highest energy times of day.
Structure the week together.
If someone you are supporting is feeling frustrated or fatigued, it is a good idea to suggest sitting down once or twice a week to map out a weekly plan. They can map out rehabilitation and medical appointments, household tasks, rest, social time and “nothing planned” buffer time.
Keep the format simple and predictable:
- same layout each week,
- same colours for similar activities (e.g. blue for health, green for social)
- display it somewhere very visible, like the fridge or bedroom wall.
Use external aids, not memory.
Combine one main “source of truth” calendar (paper wall calendar, 2026 planner, or digital calendar) with a daily to-do list of 3–7 items. If you are looking for a good resource, Synapse’s Daily Activity Journal has been designed specifically for people living with brain injury. This journal allows them to keep track of their appointments and daily activities.
There are a variety of other external memory supports with proven benefits for people who have a brain injury, including phone calendars with alarms, visual timetables, colour-coded paper planners, sticky note checklists, whiteboards and pill organisers with set times.
Example support roles
| Area | What supporter does | How does it help the person |
Appointments |
Enters bookings into a shared calendar during the call and confirms transport and prep steps. | Reduces missed appointments and last‑minute panic while modelling planning. |
Daily routine |
Co‑creates a morning and evening routine checklist with times and uses prompts to follow it. | Builds automatic habits, so less effort is needed to get through the day. |
Weekly review |
Reviews what worked, what felt overwhelming, and adjusts next week’s schedule. | Gives a sense of control and supports pacing and energy management. |
Using technology to make it brain injury-friendly.
- Use mainstream tools (Google Calendar, Apple/Android calendar, reminder apps) with multiple alarms: one “prepare” alarm (e.g. 60 minutes before) and one “leave now” alarm.
- Keep phone setups very minimal: large fonts, home screen with only a few key apps (calendar, messages, maps, notes), and turn off non‑essential notifications that add noise.
Support timing, pacing and energy.
It is best to schedule demanding appointments and tasks at their best time of day, protect rest periods in the calendar as non-negotiable “recovery time,” and encourage stopping before exhaustion rather than pushing through.
If you need more information or help to support someone living with a brain injury, reach out to us on 1800 673 074.