We spend time, save time, take time, and make it; manage, track, and save it; we kill time, we pass it, we waste it, borrow, and steal it. We abuse time and it beats us back up, either in retribution or self-defense. It’s a zero-sum perspective of the material of our lives; it makes us prisoners to our own utility. The AI said nothing about love, loyalty, or enthusiasm. When you wrap those up, it becomes clear that the best thing to do with time is to devote it. That is how you get time on your side. When you are working with time instead of against it, every bit matters, it all counts, even the fallow times, the empty times, the time off the path.
Time and the Future
Silly to have next Friday displayed with the same amount of detail as today.
a snapshot in time
Tracking time and energy ## A simple colouring system @juvoni's B.A.G.E.L system is a simple system for colouring. I like how he uses red (danger) vs green (positive) as a simple colouring system. You could apply that also to calendar colouring. Green blocks for stuff you want to do more off and red blocks for stuff that has a negative impact on you. Makes analysing time and energy very easy.
Calendar UI's are one of the most interesting interfaces where we barely have seen innovation in the last 30 years.
Time is an asset to be managed through instrumental reason.
interface of how much or how someone is part of your life
Time is almost never alone, but shared
A feature where you can signal you’re ready for a meeting and if everyone is it pulls everyone in, even if it’s not time to start yet. Might be an interesting way to eliminate those ‘I have 15 mins between now and next meeting’.
Data is siloed in single apps, which makes it hard to retrieve. I want my Swarm or Google Maps pins stored somewhere incredibly safe. They are like a Harry Potter memory bowl for places I visit, things I did, and thoughts I had.
People are social animals. So time (and therefore calendars) should also be inherently social.
1. What could you build that will enable asynchronous work? 2. Now that productivity will be measured less by hours worked, how will it be measured? https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1335570973265960960
Calendars can be a space for logging events that journals are not optimal for. How stressed were you? when did you work out? how much? dotpad integrations.. location, consumption, fitness, output done
Documenting your time. GCal is terrible for more advanced metadata. How about adding meeting notes easily?
show me a calendar- so I can find emails from a certain day, a certain month, or a certain week. Let me step through time easily- It matters to me that I can find emails in the past from only a vague recollection of the time I received it. I should be able to go to January 5 2017, and then zoom out to the week or month, but also to step forward and backward, to the next day, or the day before. show me people - so I can find emails from my friends, significant others, and colleagues show me conversations - so I can find emails I'm actually engaged in. If I reply to a person frequently, then they're a much more important contact than accounts I receive promotions from. show my newsletters to me already opened, and in a stack each day - so I can glance through them quickly and find interesting information
When you are working on a project, it is so easy to lose sight of how much you have progressed or the things that happened in the past. You can become fixated on what's still lacking.
i've been starting my weeks on Fridays
Automatically suggest when your friends are available so you can hang out
If calendar apps were designed with output in mind, they would ask for priorities before you allocate your time.
Why do we always have to fill every minute. We fill every last minute. Indeed we have become so addicted to filling time that we never can sit still anymore. the metaphor “time is a container that must be filled” has a surprising number of toxic side effects, outside of just scheduling craziness @ work Media to fill time Our current media mess was created in part by this need to “fill time” 24/7. no emptiness or silence allowed
Digital calendars are logistical media, part of the infrastructure that configures arrangements among people and things. Calendars increasingly play a fundamental role in establishing our everyday rhythms, shaping our consciousness of temporality. Drawing on interviews with Silicon Valley calendar designers, this article explores how the conceptualization and production of scheduling applications codify contemporary ideals about efficient time management. I argue that these ideals reflect the driving cultural imperative for accelerated time handling in order to optimize productivity and minimize time wasting. Such mechanistic approaches treat time as a quantitative, individualistic resource, obscuring the politics of time embedded in what can and cannot be graphically represented on the grid interface. I conclude that electronic calendars are emblematic of a long-standing but mistaken belief, hegemonic in Silicon Valley, that automation will deliver us more time.
🥃 Swallowing time when you go out for drinks with someone, your glasses are like clocks — and you’re both swallowing time! if you want to stretch out the date, you sip a little slower. if you’re not feeling it, you gulp down the minutes as fast as you can.
Time is not equal, the older you get, the faster it moves Casey Neistat
Your calendar is like a bank account where you get 168 hours in allowance every week.
A calendar is blank by default, waited to be filled The original sin of digital calendars is that they’re blank by default. All white. Waiting to be “colored in” with the events of your life. The blank-by-default style of representing time implies that your time is not accounted for. Empty wasteland. Nothing to see here. This is an especially bad default in the corporate world, where Gcal has turned private calendars into a shared commons.
First we shaped our calendar tools, and thereafter our calendar tools shaped us.
Timeline overview for the big projects in your lifetime For example. With who are you in contact most. Restarted my friendship with x. Everyday ask, what were the people where you had most contact with.
Planner: Calendars are helpful for visualizing your time, which gives you superpowers over how you spend that time. While this isn't too far off from how people already use calendars, I think it's vastly underrated.
Organize time and make it meaningful.
A calendar lifelog including: • Locations (Google Maps, Swarm) • Media consumption (books, Netflix, Spotify) • Browser history / Screentime • Stress levels (Oura, Apple Watch) • Exercise & nutrition data (Strava, MyFitnessPal) • People (CRM) • Photos and videos (Google Photos) • Social media (Twitter, Instagram)
Scaffolding for a memory palace: Calendar events inevitably neglect most relevant details about the past, but nonetheless they can serve as a trigger to place you in your memory palace. They create anchors in your mind that can help you recall other details.
**Questions on Time** How do we comprehend and navigate the on-demand, customizable and digital spatialization of time? These are flexible, “physical” spaces, of no fixed size. Some manifested deliberately (games) and others only emergent (the expectation on response times for different communication mediums: eg email vs chat) They can be local or global. They may exist for minutes (intercom chat support conversation) an hour+ (a stream) or for years and decades. They may facilitate synchronous (Twitch) or asynchronous (YouTube) interactions. Time may also be configured as linear or cyclical.
Real time is slower than social-media time, where everything feels urgent. Real time often includes periods of silence, reflection, growth, space, self-forgiveness, processing with loved ones, rest, and responsibility.
A new app called Spase is just starting to scratch the surface of what’s possible here. Built by Sahil Gupta, it’s a calendar that represents time as three-dimensional space. It feels more like a video game than a calendar. You can “fly” around the weeks and months, zooming in and out as you navigate the landscape of your time. Check it out: Once we escape the 2D Gregorian-grid prison, we can visualize time as a stream we’re floating in, a viscous fluid we’re wading through, a path, a memory palace of our own design. So what? If our current ways of representing and thinking about time are causing us so much anxiety, we might as well go back to basics. When we question the assumptions that are built into our tools, we can think more clearly about how they’re influencing us and how we can make them better. Now’s the time!
A quote from a Breaking Smart article about Bergsonian Stream Time, which questions the typical “past = locked, future = open” dichotomy: Bergsonian time … is an altogether different beast. Think of it as being more like a memory-bookkeeping understanding of time that puts subjective time ahead of objective time, kairos ahead of chronos. The past is not necessarily fully locked down, and the future is not necessarily fully open. Unpaid bills/invoices and active contracts that constrain the future are more hard-edged examples of what I mean. In experienced time, the past, present, and future interact in the form of complex settling memories within which promises, debts, commitments, and intentions all evolve together, sort of like a blockchain. The present is already memory as it is being experienced, and if there are keys, they are spread out across a window of active, unsettled events with potentialities. Perhaps a better term for Bergsonian time is an abstract sort of roiling potential energy.
A major stimulus to improving the accuracy and reliability of clocks was the importance of precise time-keeping for navigation. The position of a ship at sea could be determined with reasonable accuracy if a navigator could refer to a clock that lost or gained less than about 10 seconds per day. This clock could not contain a pendulum, which would be virtually useless on a rocking ship. Until advances in the late twentieth century, navigation depended on the ability to measure latitude and longitude. Latitude can be determined through celestial navigation; the measurement of longitude requires accurate knowledge of time. This need was a major motivation for the development of accurate mechanical clocks. Use of wristwatches subsequently became widespread among the officer class. The company Mappin & Webb began production of their successful 'campaign watch' for soldiers during the campaign at the Sudan in 1898 and ramped up production for the Boer War a few years later
