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Ask HN: How do you visualize calendar time?
I often have difficulty keeping track of upcoming dates and effectively understanding where the current day fits in relative to previous and future dates. One recent symptom of this is when it didn't occur to me during the last week of February that my March 2 plans were for the following week. Some time ago I started using a wall calendar instead of just a digital calendar and that's been a noticeable improvement in my time tracking, but since I only see one month at time, it still failed to prevent that Feb - March issue. Shortly after that happened, I bought a second wall calendar so I could see two months at once.
One thing I've noticed with the physical wall calendars is that it allows me to associate a date with a location (eg. third row down on the calendar). This makes it easier to mentally anticipate upcoming events since I have a general sense of where today falls on the calendar and what I've thought about for the time associated with the nearby area. Thinking about events that aren't in the current or following month though puts me back at square one. I don't have a place to visualize them and I'm not aware of approaching them unless I look ahead on the calendar or until the event falls on the following month.
Something I'm considering is trying to apply the method of loci memorization technique to the calendar for a year. That way I could visualize a real or imaginary linear landscape where each location is associated with a month and day. I'm not great at visualizing things though and have always found the method of loci difficult to implement, so I'm skeptical of how well I could get this to work for myself.
In thinking about this, I'm reminded of the recent post on HN about how someone visualizes numbers [1]. I imagine people with more active or capable visualization abilities might have a similarly effective approach to conceptualizing time.
How do you visualize calendar time?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30539292
- tra3 5y agoAre you sure this is worth the mental load? Whenever I have something that requires advanced preparation I set a reminder for weeks in advance. It doesn't always work, but trying to remember upcoming events is untenable, at least for me.
- monroewalker 5y agoI think it's worth non-trivial effort on my part to adopt a strategy that gives me a better grasp of time. There are certainly more pragmatic approaches than attempting to apply the method of loci, but it's a fun idea to play with and has the potential to allow tacking on additional information such as the day of week each calendar day of a given year will be.
- tra3 5y agoWhen you say "better grasp of time", what do you mean? What is the purpose of knowing the day of the week ahead of time? I have trouble with the passage of time and planning in general, also, so I'm interested what you're trying to achieve.
- monroewalker 5y agoI mean I'd like to improve my ability to conceptualize dates (eg. Sept 21, Jan 2, May 20..) so that I can think about them analogously to how I think about locations. As an example, imagine your friend Bob is telling you that last weekend they went base jumping off of the world's fifth tallest bridge. That'd probably evoke a mental image of some bridge and Bob base jumping, but that mental image is untethered to any existing conceptions you have of places in the world. If instead they told you they base jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, you would be able to invoke your existing knowledge of where the Golden Gate Bridge is and associate that information with it. If your other friend, Alice, told you later that day she took a trip to San Francisco the past weekend, you'd realize that Alice and Bob were in SF over the same weekend. For me, thinking about some date is like thinking about "the world's fifth tallest bridge". Unless there's a significant event that occurs on or very near that date, the date is mostly arbitrary to me and thinking about it doesn't connect with any existing knowledge. If Bob tells me he has a trip coming up on Nov 17 and Alice later tells me she has a trip on Nov 16, I'm unlikely to realize that the trips occur a day apart. The day of the week for a given date would just be a handy thing to be aware of. It could also add context to the date that makes the date easier to visualize. This is similar, though, to relying completely on GPS vs trying to be more geographically aware. There isn't necessarily a functional difference between the two since we essentially always have access to GPS. I don't think there'd be much of a difference between the version of my future where I continue using calendars as I have been and the version where I pursue some alternate way to think about dates. It would just be nice to have a more solid way of thinking about dates and connecting them to existing knowledge.
- tra3 5y agoFascinating. Thanks for writing this up, I never thought about dates in this manner. It's interesting that you bring up GPS, I'm almost completely geographically disabled, if that makes sense. I struggle somewhat in gridded cities, but I can work things out logically. As soon as I'm in a forrest I almost immediately become lost. I'm relying on a 4 tiered system these days - my phone, my gps enabled watch and an InReach when I'm really out of range. The fourth and the most reliable is my friend who has an incredible sense of direction. I'm not sure whether my lack of geo-sense comes from relying on GPS too much and losing the ability or never having it in the first place. Have you found anything useful with respect to improving your geographical awareness? Back to dates though... Thinking about it, I've made a mistake before where end of the month boundary dates (eg February 27th and March 2) were "a month apart" rather than next to each other. I haven't found anything particularly useful in this regard other than diligent calendaring. I suspect it has something to do with limited working memory. Future planning is particularly hard. That seems to be a universal constant though. In terms of past events, I've found it useful to stick things in spaced repetition systems (like Anki). It was always difficult for me to recall where I was camping or travelling last year. SRS made it easier: Q: Where was I travelling in the summer of 2020? A: I was in blah blah. Q: When did we go visit an abandoned mansion? A: Spring of 2022. Thanks for an interesting conversation.
- snisarenko 5y agoJust FYI Google Calendar web does allow you to shift your calendar view 1 week at a time (i.e. you can see 2 weeks from feb, 2 weeks for march). The UX for it is just super hidden and cumbersome. In the top left, there is a date selector. Click it, and then select a date in the middle of the month
- monroewalker 5y agoThanks! Even with different views like that, I find I never internalize a representation of the calendar when using a digital calendar. Having the static physical calendar on the wall makes it much easier for me to visualize.
- snisarenko 5y agoOh forgot to mention. It only works if you have custom view that's set to show 3 weeks :( Someone needs to make a chrome extension to shift Google Cal 1 week at a time. Cause the engineers at google sure aren't gonna do it :(
- kderbyma 5y agoI tend to use a circle as a representation with June and July floating around the 6PM position. New years is 12 o clock, but it goes counter clockwise not clockwise. --- however, cards could work well for weeks. you give each a suit and a value. ---- also for weekdays I think of it like a queue of slots which run like an assembly line shunting one at a time. with the weekend acting like a bigger bucket with a flexible divider.
- monroewalker 5y agoThanks for sharing! I like the clock idea. It doesn't allow for a very granular visualization on the level of weeks or days, but it's at least feasible enough for me to carve out a more distinct area to visualize for a given month than I could if just trying to picture a linear calendar. I also like the idea of thinking about the weeks instead of the days. 365 is a huge amount to create unique associations for, but just memorizing the 52 weeks is much more feasible. Locating an event to within its given week would probably get me 90% of the way to whatever outcome a day-specific approach would achieve. Plus if needed, I think an additional strategy could be layered on top of the weeks approach. Eg. having a reusable "peg" mnemonic for the days of the week and adapting that to fit the association for a given week. Can you elaborate on the weekdays approach?
- p0d 5y agoI have a printout of the next few months of my calender sitting under my keyboard.