#executive function boop

Longer post. Musings on timesense, for those with 'poor sense of time'.

Questions to think about: How do you experience time? How do you think about time? Do you struggle to tell time on an analog clock? Do you struggle to know how many hours away something is if it's at X o'clock and the time is currently N o'clock? To know about how many units of time (minutes, hours, months, or years) have passed since something you experienced? Do you think about time in units? Is it easy? Do you think about time in cycles? Is that easy?

If your brain is like mine, it struggles to convert between the cyclical time with routines of both larger and smaller scope that it was built for, and the linear time and endless entropy that we are raised to live under.

Instead of being taught to watch the angle of the sun in the sky, or the positions of the stars at night, or the phase of the moon, we are taught that there's a numberline of years that divides into months and weeks and days and hours and minutes and seconds, and it marches ever-onward in one direction. Instead of knowing that's it's time to plant certain seeds because it's a thing that happens every time in the cycle when specific things are going on in the environment around me, I look in a book and figure out which planting zone I'm in and what the numbers and words in the calendar squares should look like when it's time to plant and then forget about it until it's too late.

Laundry is at the end of the week. And then it has to be done again at the next end of the week, even though you finished it last week (or even if you didn't). Instead of laundry being a thing that is done on the day after everyone's work clothes get dirty from house cleaning and the day before resting and gathering with family in your best fresh clean clothes, or something like that.

Humanity has long used the location of astronomical bodies in the sky, the growth stages of native plants (which used to be much more stable), the breeding cycles of animals (*further angry environmentalist grumbles*) and myriad other natural signifiers of where time is in its cycle, relative to us and our experience of it, as a way to conceptualize and communicate about time. It's only relatively recently that it became all about numbers.

I wasn't taught to recite the 13 different moons of the year, in sequence, along with what would be happening in the world when each rises. I was taught to recite days of the week and the months of the year, in order. And I was separately taught that there were certain meanings to certain numbered days in certain months or to certain days that might change in numbering slightly every year because it's the first or fourth of that day-of-the-week in that month, in certain months. And sometimes the meanings were directly associated with the time of year, like a day with a harvest festival theme in late autumn. And sometimes they apparently had nothing to do with it, like the love day in late winter.

And I damned well wasn't taught how to automatically convert a number in a date into the name of a month, and then conceptualize what the weather and plants and sky are like during the time period we call by that name.

Instead of "what will I be doing in 2027", I ask myself "what is something I want to make a priority to put some energy and focus into over the next 12 months"

Learning to think more in cycles has helped. It also somehow gives me permission to start up again, if I skipped a cycle (or several), and even to adjust how much effort I put in and much I bother getting done. It's more forgiving than deadlines and 'first I must fully complete this, for only then can I begin that'.

I do think about time in units, because that's the world I was raised in, but it's always a struggle to do the thinking. My main experience of time is 'very fuzzy old past memories of experiences', 'fuzzy new past memories of experiences', 'somewhat fuzzy recent past memories of experiences', 'the present', 'the anticipated near future', and 'fuzzy possibilities of things an indeterminant relative experience of the passing of time later'. My focus is on the present, and a very short span of time immediately before and after it. Everything else is blurred and smudged.

As part of the 'learning to think about time cyclically' process, I have a two analog clocks with day-of-the-week hands, and I removed the minute hand from one of them. The weekdays are arranged in a circle, which really helps me fully conceptualize the week cycle (nearly all calendars start on Sundays, but we always recite the days of the week starting with Monday, and we never see more than seven days in a row). Without the minute hand, I don't have to calculate things... I just estimate the time based on the position of the hour hand. I bought a 24-hour clock motor and will be making a clock with only an hour hand, that goes around the clock once every 24 hours. And I might get a phase-of-moon clock for the fun of it.

My long-term reminder system is 12 sheets of paper, one for each month, using small sticky notes to put goals or tasks I want to try to do each year (or every six months or three years or whatever) onto the months I want to do them in. I display the current month and the following month, reviewing them often enough that I'm not surprised when the time to do something rolls around. I wrote the name of the month on each sheet, along with the expected general temperature for that time of year (I need to add weather expectations and fire season as well).

My shorter-term-and/or-specific-date(s) calendar is a pair of blank 5-week calendar sheets that I magnetically post side-by side and fill in, letting me always see (and change) major plans five to ten weeks ahead. Also mark every-other-week as the week that the recycling bin goes out alongside the weekly trash bin. The fourth Monday of every month, when there's a community event that happens nearby that I could technically attend if I ever decided to. Things further ahead get magnetically stuck below the calendar pages. I've even made some magnets for recurring things that I can slap onto the calendar squares (like the cat's subcutaneous fluids treatment that needs to happen three times a week, but which has a little leeway on specific days).

I have cards with routine tasks, in daily, day-of-week, monthly, and other categories, cycling some cards every day, some every week, some every month, some during equinoxes and solstices... (if that sounds interesting, see my '#do deck' tag).

My main routine is looking at and updating these cyclical planning systems, so that I know what to expect in a range of timeframes, from 'this morning' to 'the next few days' and on up.