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I'm going to take this opportunity to shamelessly self-promote my own attempt at creating an entirely new calendar system, inspired by Paul Graham's Maker/Manag

I'm going to take this opportunity to shamelessly self-promote my own attempt at creating an entirely new calendar system, inspired by Paul Graham's Maker/Manager Schedule essay. It's called Maker Time, and the current Maker Time is 35. Here is it's pitch: Your clock has it backwards. * Time is infinite, but our time on earth is not. * Clocks should count down, not up. * Time keeping should be based on meaningful celestial events like the year (one earth rotation around the sun) and the day (one rotation of the earth) * Each unit of time should be based on a viable period of work for makers. * Maker Time is reset on January 1st each year. The year is divided into 1095 blocks (1098 in leap year). Every 8 hours the count decreases by one. Here is a browser-based Maker Time clock: http://willholloway.net/makertime.html http://willholloway.net/makertime.html Here is a github repo for a simple Maker Time API Flask server and the algo for calculating the current Maker Time if one wants to implement it. I still hope it catches on. https://github.com/willholloway/makertime https://github.com/willholloway/makertime

artursapek 10y ago
Interesting idea. Do people not find stressful a clock counting down on them constantly? I've always been stressed out by the idea of time "running out" in various contexts (games, tests in school). So much so that it hinders my performance.
- willholloway 10y ago
  The rundown is very slow and gentle, and then it resets on January 1st. Right now there are 35 eight hour blocks of time left in 2016. It's a numerical representation of the time left in a year. I like to think of it as 35 chances to make meaningful progress on important things in 2016.
  - artursapek 10y ago
    I might experiment with this. Thanks for sharing.
- LeifCarrotson 10y ago
  Not as much if there's no real impact other than that it's going to be reset. Watching Maker Clock count down from 1000 each year of the rest of my life would not be too stressful. I will grant that a clock that counted down from 50,000 or so to zero on my expected deathbed would not be as zen-like as the Maker Clock purports to be. Just calculating that number is zen-like, but a daily reminder would not be. A warning: if you're stressed out by the idea of time running out, don't click this link. But I found this graphic description of the years, months, and weeks in a typical life to be surprising: http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html I don't typically think of a year or a week as lasting as long as it appears to in those images.
  - artursapek 10y ago
    I will never see a waitbutwhy link and not click on it. Thanks, this is actually fascinating.
lawless123 10y ago
What would we gain by switching?
- willholloway 10y ago
  The soothing zen feeling of not being on anyone else's schedule :) Maker Time is for people who build things, and building things requires decently long periods of focused time without interruptions. But it also reminds you that time is passing and that you can not waste it. It's the perfect clock for startup founders on the hack on product, eat, exercise and sleep lifestyle in an early stage company.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    Can't I just hide my clock, then? It's also weird if you start hacking at 2, and wake up the next day and start hacking at 1095. Or 1098.
    - willholloway 10y ago
      Yes but it is helpful for tax purposes! The clock switching from 2 to 1095 means that: You have survived another rotation of the earth around the sun and It's time to close last years books and open a new set and deduct your business expenses against the new
      - pavel_lishin 10y ago
        But... going from 2016 to 2017 does the same thing.
  - theoh 10y ago
    Nobody wants to be a slave to someone else's schedule, but let's not elevate "makers" above all the other valuable and productive human roles.
  - noxToken 10y ago
    This sounds like a lot of headache for very little gain. Now you have two calendars to keep track of (because let's be real, this won't gain widespread adoption) that gives you less information than the Gregorian calendar. Clocks count upwards precisely because time is infinite. When you count down, you're counting towards a finite point. The Gregorian calendar is already based on meaningful celestial events - a complete orbit around the sun and a complete earth rotation. And just like Maker Time, it resets every year. Yes, you get this feeling of workable time periods, but we already get this with clocks. And with Maker Time, your periods are pre-defined: 12-8, 8-16, 8-24. if you work from 9-17 (like many people), Maker Time already encroaches upon two different periods. Lastly, you can't realistically schedule anything, because an 8 hour window is too large to coordinate. It's a good attempt. I'm not just commenting to crap all over Maker Time, but it solves a non-problem.
pavel_lishin 10y ago
I think you forgot to include the link to the repo, but I'm still a little confused - so, repo time counts Years up, but Blocks down? And if so, why do years start in 1981? And if it's a calendar, why break it up by a finer increment than a day?
- willholloway 10y ago
  I edited post to include link. The count starts at 1095, because there are 1095 eight hour blocks of time in a normal year, there are 1098 in a leap year. The idea is to destroy the calendar, and destroy the clock! Replace them with a slow gentle reminder of the passage of time, instead of this fine-grained instrument we use now. I find that the main thing exact time keeping does in my life is to create scheduled events that I don't want to go to! Meetings and pointless social events, I would rather be hacking or building in a zen like flow state. Of course to really achieve that dream I would have to be single and shun my family, and then I would get lonely :) But I still like Maker Time. It is a comfort. It all started as an exercise in exploring Decimal Time. But Decimal time has all kinds of problems and all implementations are really clunky. And the reason is that the solar and lunar calendars don't sync nicely. I found what I think is a pretty elegant compromise, by breaking the day into 8 hour time periods. Decimal time was attempted in the early Americas and most famously during the French Revolution. A form of Decimal time was at one point the official calendar of France.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    You'd also have to shun dentist appointments. It's an interesting idea, but I think it's impractical for 99.999% of people.
    - willholloway 10y ago
      In my ideal world things like dentist visits would be completely asynchronous. Until then, Maker Time will have to live in peaceful coexistence with the Gregorian Calendar. Edit: I think it's important to point out that not all cultures share the same sense of time. While my ideas here are heretical in America, or Germany, the spirit of what I am getting at would be very familiar to a Spaniard, an Italian or a Jamaican. Here is an interesting article on it: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-different-cultures-understand-time-2014-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-different-cultures-unders...
shawabawa3 10y ago
Makertime is 34 for me (10 minutes later). Are there timezones? Are there equivalent of months/minutes/seconds? How do you organise events around it? The event starts at 34.5?
- willholloway 10y ago
  The browser clock I wrote is written in Javascript and runs off the local time in your browser. I have not implemented those. The idea was to do the opposite of the granular nature of our current time keeping paradigm. To smooth out time, and think of it in larger blocks, the kinds of blocks where hard problems can really be tackled in. Its precisely not for organizing events, although you could. For example, 35 corresponds to the 8-4PM period on December 20th of every non leap year. Its time keeping for a small team that just got seed funding as in hardcore build mode, or for people living like Thoreau at Walden.
it_learnses 10y ago
what do you think of the form: blocks left this year / blocks left this week
- willholloway 10y ago
  Awesome! Although the dream was to live completely asynchronously and divorce oneself from the oppresive orthodox time keeping system, I think a reminder of time left in a week is useful, as a work week is a real unit of measurement, the human body/mind can only go for so long without rest. Maybe blocksyear:blocksweek or blocksweek:blocksyear I hope people fork Maker Time and innovate on it. So happy I shared this today.
  - pc86 10y ago
    > the dream was to live completely asynchronously and divorce oneself from the oppresive orthodox time keeping system Words have lost all meaning.
gliderShip 10y ago
I would love a sci-fi tv show exploring this idea.
- mtgx 10y ago
  Kind of like this movie? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637688/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637688/
mc32 10y ago
Interestingly the Romans had a hybrid system. If my recollection is correct I think they counted up to the Ides of the month then counted down to the beginning of the next month (Kalends?) I have no idea as to why they worked their calendars that way but apparently they did (and apparently they changed the mechanism from time to time).
- brianshaler 10y ago
  If you think about how we often say the time within an hour as "15 past X" and "15 til X," doing the same with days in the month doesn't seem as exotic.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
    There's that language where they do the 'til' thing with the half-hour. Yeah, those guys.
    - lorenzhs 10y ago
      Yup, in German "halb sechs" is half past five, whereas in the U.K. "half six" would be half past six. It's quite confusing if you're used to one system and suddenly need to use the other.
      - flurdy 10y ago
        Confuses the hell out of my missus and kids (which are all English but speak Norwegian) when I say in sentences in half Norwegian half English. Did he mean "half to" or "half past"... My missus just shakes her head when I use the phrases such as "fem på halv" as in "five to half" which means 25 minutes past the current hour, or "ti over halv" ("ten past half") as in "twenty to the hour"...
        lorenzhs 10y ago
        We use the same phrases in German, "fünf vor halb" and "zehn nach halb". It's quite useful, there's a description for every five minute offset to the hour: five/ten to/past the half hour or hour, quarter to/past the hour, and of course the infamous "half to". That's before adding in regional time formats, which mostly require reconstruction of missing words ("viertel sechs" is 5:15, "dreiviertel sechs" (three quarters six") 5:45 in my area)
imaginenore 10y ago
That's just a different representation of the day of the year. Basically (365 - dayoftheyear) * 3.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
edgarvaldes 10y ago
This is a really interesting concept. It's like a big pomodoro calendar.
crudbug 10y ago
Interesting, I would divide 24 hrs into 4 parts .. 6x4 = 24. 2 parts mental exercise, 1 part physical, 1 part sleep. 1 day earth, 1 month into lunar, 1 year solar.
jessedhillon 10y ago
I love this! Here's a quick and dirty calendar visualization I put together: https://gist.github.com/jessedhillon/bb8282db6d109f076795a9871cce650c https://gist.github.com/jessedhillon/bb8282db6d109f076795a98... Screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/i7Ru7 http://imgur.com/a/i7Ru7
- jessedhillon 10y ago
  Codepen: http://codepen.io/anon/pen/aBMGaB http://codepen.io/anon/pen/aBMGaB

artursapek 10y ago

Interesting idea. Do people not find stressful a clock counting down on them constantly? I've always been stressed out by the idea of time "running out" in various contexts (games, tests in school). So much so that it hinders my performance.

willholloway 10y ago
The rundown is very slow and gentle, and then it resets on January 1st. Right now there are 35 eight hour blocks of time left in 2016. It's a numerical representation of the time left in a year. I like to think of it as 35 chances to make meaningful progress on important things in 2016.
- artursapek 10y ago
  I might experiment with this. Thanks for sharing.
LeifCarrotson 10y ago
Not as much if there's no real impact other than that it's going to be reset. Watching Maker Clock count down from 1000 each year of the rest of my life would not be too stressful. I will grant that a clock that counted down from 50,000 or so to zero on my expected deathbed would not be as zen-like as the Maker Clock purports to be. Just calculating that number is zen-like, but a daily reminder would not be. A warning: if you're stressed out by the idea of time running out, don't click this link. But I found this graphic description of the years, months, and weeks in a typical life to be surprising: http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html I don't typically think of a year or a week as lasting as long as it appears to in those images.
- artursapek 10y ago
  I will never see a waitbutwhy link and not click on it. Thanks, this is actually fascinating.

lawless123 10y ago

What would we gain by switching?

willholloway 10y ago
The soothing zen feeling of not being on anyone else's schedule :) Maker Time is for people who build things, and building things requires decently long periods of focused time without interruptions. But it also reminds you that time is passing and that you can not waste it. It's the perfect clock for startup founders on the hack on product, eat, exercise and sleep lifestyle in an early stage company.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  Can't I just hide my clock, then? It's also weird if you start hacking at 2, and wake up the next day and start hacking at 1095. Or 1098.
  - willholloway 10y ago
    Yes but it is helpful for tax purposes! The clock switching from 2 to 1095 means that: You have survived another rotation of the earth around the sun and It's time to close last years books and open a new set and deduct your business expenses against the new
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
      But... going from 2016 to 2017 does the same thing.
- theoh 10y ago
  Nobody wants to be a slave to someone else's schedule, but let's not elevate "makers" above all the other valuable and productive human roles.
- noxToken 10y ago
  This sounds like a lot of headache for very little gain. Now you have two calendars to keep track of (because let's be real, this won't gain widespread adoption) that gives you less information than the Gregorian calendar. Clocks count upwards precisely because time is infinite. When you count down, you're counting towards a finite point. The Gregorian calendar is already based on meaningful celestial events - a complete orbit around the sun and a complete earth rotation. And just like Maker Time, it resets every year. Yes, you get this feeling of workable time periods, but we already get this with clocks. And with Maker Time, your periods are pre-defined: 12-8, 8-16, 8-24. if you work from 9-17 (like many people), Maker Time already encroaches upon two different periods. Lastly, you can't realistically schedule anything, because an 8 hour window is too large to coordinate. It's a good attempt. I'm not just commenting to crap all over Maker Time, but it solves a non-problem.

pavel_lishin 10y ago

I think you forgot to include the link to the repo, but I'm still a little confused - so, repo time counts Years up, but Blocks down? And if so, why do years start in 1981? And if it's a calendar, why break it up by a finer increment than a day?

willholloway 10y ago
I edited post to include link. The count starts at 1095, because there are 1095 eight hour blocks of time in a normal year, there are 1098 in a leap year. The idea is to destroy the calendar, and destroy the clock! Replace them with a slow gentle reminder of the passage of time, instead of this fine-grained instrument we use now. I find that the main thing exact time keeping does in my life is to create scheduled events that I don't want to go to! Meetings and pointless social events, I would rather be hacking or building in a zen like flow state. Of course to really achieve that dream I would have to be single and shun my family, and then I would get lonely :) But I still like Maker Time. It is a comfort. It all started as an exercise in exploring Decimal Time. But Decimal time has all kinds of problems and all implementations are really clunky. And the reason is that the solar and lunar calendars don't sync nicely. I found what I think is a pretty elegant compromise, by breaking the day into 8 hour time periods. Decimal time was attempted in the early Americas and most famously during the French Revolution. A form of Decimal time was at one point the official calendar of France.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  You'd also have to shun dentist appointments. It's an interesting idea, but I think it's impractical for 99.999% of people.
  - willholloway 10y ago
    In my ideal world things like dentist visits would be completely asynchronous. Until then, Maker Time will have to live in peaceful coexistence with the Gregorian Calendar. Edit: I think it's important to point out that not all cultures share the same sense of time. While my ideas here are heretical in America, or Germany, the spirit of what I am getting at would be very familiar to a Spaniard, an Italian or a Jamaican. Here is an interesting article on it: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-different-cultures-understand-time-2014-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-different-cultures-unders...

shawabawa3 10y ago

Makertime is 34 for me (10 minutes later). Are there timezones? Are there equivalent of months/minutes/seconds? How do you organise events around it? The event starts at 34.5?

willholloway 10y ago
The browser clock I wrote is written in Javascript and runs off the local time in your browser. I have not implemented those. The idea was to do the opposite of the granular nature of our current time keeping paradigm. To smooth out time, and think of it in larger blocks, the kinds of blocks where hard problems can really be tackled in. Its precisely not for organizing events, although you could. For example, 35 corresponds to the 8-4PM period on December 20th of every non leap year. Its time keeping for a small team that just got seed funding as in hardcore build mode, or for people living like Thoreau at Walden.

it_learnses 10y ago

what do you think of the form: blocks left this year / blocks left this week

willholloway 10y ago
Awesome! Although the dream was to live completely asynchronously and divorce oneself from the oppresive orthodox time keeping system, I think a reminder of time left in a week is useful, as a work week is a real unit of measurement, the human body/mind can only go for so long without rest. Maybe blocksyear:blocksweek or blocksweek:blocksyear I hope people fork Maker Time and innovate on it. So happy I shared this today.
- pc86 10y ago
  > the dream was to live completely asynchronously and divorce oneself from the oppresive orthodox time keeping system Words have lost all meaning.

gliderShip 10y ago

I would love a sci-fi tv show exploring this idea.

mtgx 10y ago
Kind of like this movie? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637688/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637688/

mc32 10y ago

Interestingly the Romans had a hybrid system. If my recollection is correct I think they counted up to the Ides of the month then counted down to the beginning of the next month (Kalends?) I have no idea as to why they worked their calendars that way but apparently they did (and apparently they changed the mechanism from time to time).

brianshaler 10y ago
If you think about how we often say the time within an hour as "15 past X" and "15 til X," doing the same with days in the month doesn't seem as exotic.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
  There's that language where they do the 'til' thing with the half-hour. Yeah, those guys.
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    Yup, in German "halb sechs" is half past five, whereas in the U.K. "half six" would be half past six. It's quite confusing if you're used to one system and suddenly need to use the other.
    - flurdy 10y ago
      Confuses the hell out of my missus and kids (which are all English but speak Norwegian) when I say in sentences in half Norwegian half English. Did he mean "half to" or "half past"... My missus just shakes her head when I use the phrases such as "fem på halv" as in "five to half" which means 25 minutes past the current hour, or "ti over halv" ("ten past half") as in "twenty to the hour"...
      - lorenzhs 10y ago
        We use the same phrases in German, "fünf vor halb" and "zehn nach halb". It's quite useful, there's a description for every five minute offset to the hour: five/ten to/past the half hour or hour, quarter to/past the hour, and of course the infamous "half to". That's before adding in regional time formats, which mostly require reconstruction of missing words ("viertel sechs" is 5:15, "dreiviertel sechs" (three quarters six") 5:45 in my area)

imaginenore 10y ago

That's just a different representation of the day of the year. Basically (365 - dayoftheyear) * 3.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

edgarvaldes 10y ago

This is a really interesting concept. It's like a big pomodoro calendar.

crudbug 10y ago

Interesting, I would divide 24 hrs into 4 parts .. 6x4 = 24. 2 parts mental exercise, 1 part physical, 1 part sleep. 1 day earth, 1 month into lunar, 1 year solar.

jessedhillon 10y ago

I love this! Here's a quick and dirty calendar visualization I put together: https://gist.github.com/jessedhillon/bb8282db6d109f076795a9871cce650c https://gist.github.com/jessedhillon/bb8282db6d109f076795a98... Screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/i7Ru7 http://imgur.com/a/i7Ru7

jessedhillon 10y ago
Codepen: http://codepen.io/anon/pen/aBMGaB http://codepen.io/anon/pen/aBMGaB