Couldn't you just stack some continuous progress bars? The article is allowing use of hours, minutes and seconds, so just have a 1 minute bar, a 1 hour bar, a 1

Couldn't you just stack some continuous progress bars? The article is allowing use of hours, minutes and seconds, so just have a 1 minute bar, a 1 hour bar, a 1 day bar, etc. No numbers needed, and if you differentiate between "past" and "future", say by filling in the progress bar, direction is unambiguous