In the beginning of her book Stuck? Diagrams Help. Abby Covert tells the story of helping a friend who had just undergone surgery.
After being discharged from the hospital, they make their way home with medications and info-packets in hand, stopping at a pharmacy on the way to pick up even more. By the time they got home, they had an entire collection of documents and pill bottles and pamphlets and medicine boxes and a long road to recovery ahead.
You can imagine the overwhelm both Covert and her friend were feeling in this challenging time of recovery and uncertainty. How do you even wrap your head around all of that material that they came home with?
After helping her friend settle in to get some rest, Covert dug into the material and (guided no doubt by her background as an information architect) started sorting all of that material into four different piles. One pile of things that needed to be addressed today, another pile of things that were relevant over the next two weeks of recovery, another pile of things relevant for the longer recovery process, and the last pile containing materials that were just trying to sell then something.
After doing that sorting, she focused on just the pile relevant for the next two weeks. From that information, she created a simple yet extremely helpful diagram showing what those next two weeks were going to look like.
At 8am it was important for her friend to take Pill A. Then from 9:00am to 11:00am there would be a home health visit every other day. At 12:00pm it was time for Pill B and an injection, then at 8pm Pill C, and then the need to clean all of the equipment before bed.
Now, the image above is a pretty simple timeline, but here’s what Covert said about it: “It was the first clear picture of what life would look like for the next two weeks in recovery.”
They had come from an intense surgery in a hospital, making their way home with all of those medications and all of that information to process, and they had transitioned from that state of overwhelm to a clear picture of what life would look like, not just for Covert and her friend, but also anyone else who was coming over to support the recovery process.
Just imagine how helpful it would be to have that sketch hung up on the fridge so that whoever arrives at the home can quickly get a sense for what’s going on and how they might be helpful. Covert had taken a physical mess, an intellectual mess, and an emotional mess and she made sense of it.
That’s the power of visual thinking, where you take a complex set of information and sketch out a diagram or drawing that reduces overwhelm, provides clarity and focus, and supports intentional action.
What I appreciate about this example (and why I think Covert starts the book with it) is that it shows you that the visuals you create don’t have to be fancy. They don’t have to be illustrative. For the diagram above you only need to step up the first two rungs of the Visual Language Ladder. All you’re using are words and shapes.
So don’t discount the value that can come from simple diagrams, and maybe even consider where in your life some sort of a timeline that maps out important tasks might be useful.
If you’re interested in more of the diagramming side of visual thinking, I highly encourage you to pick up Covert’s book. This is her second. The first is How to Make Sense of Any Mess, which is already on my short list for the 2026 Sketch Instinct Book Club.
If you’d like to follow along with my exploration of the world of visual thinking, then subscribe to the Verbal to Visual Newsletter for weekly updates.
Cheers,
-Doug