How to improve your time sense?

[jbsegal]

So, I've never had a really great time-sense. Was I doing something an hour ago? Was it 3 hours ago. Has 15 minutes just passed, or has it been 90?

That short-range stuff has gotten better, but the long-term time sense is deteriorating. Was that party 2 weeks or 2 months ago? Was I talking about that subject 3 months or 2 years ago?

Does anyone have any ideas on how to improve that sort of thing, with an emphasis on internal monitoring? I can write things down, but then going back and figuring out when I wrote something down is almost as annoying as remembering the original thing, especially if I don't know what timeframe I'm looking for the notes in.

Comments

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I don't -- I'm awful at it, too. If I can relate a conversation/party/event to an external occurrence -- the weather, if I want to tell the season, or who was in which relationship, etc -- then I have a better chance of remembering. ("Oh, yeah, that conversation was at Bill's house, and I was wearing a green sweater and Kristy was sitting on Alex's lap, so it must have been 2001".) This usually only works for *vivid* memories, and I wouldn't recommend it as a system. :)

[dancingdeer.livejournal.com]

This is one of the main reasons I keep my livejournal. My time sense is absolutely terrible.

[nosebeepbear.livejournal.com]

Same here. With tags, so I can find things easily.

[smoakes777.livejournal.com]

Since I've been sick, one of the side effects is that my sense of time is shot to hell. I haven't come up with much of a system yet, but I have started dating and time-stamping EVERYTHING... Other than that, I mostly rely on others to remember. So that's my advice: be more codependant.

[dpolicar]

I'm awful at this, myself.
Recently I was participating in an ex-neighbor's background check and could not remember whether they'd moved out a year ago or two years ago, when exactly I bought the house, etc. etc. etc.
The only advice I have is that I find it works better to modify the write routine than the seek routine. That is, it's easier for me to say "Hey, I want to remember when this happened, let me think about when it is" and have that work, than to try and improve my lookup success after the fact.
Of course this is useless advice if you want to remember things that have already happened, or that you didn't think to tag when they happen.

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how useful this will be,
but I have a suspicion that human time perception
is somewhat logarithmic as we age.

I remember as an 8 or 9 year old twenty minutes
being a long time, whereas now a week is often
not long to wait. A year is a good long while for
a teenager, but much less so for most (but not all) 30 year olds.

I suspect this is part of why childhood traumas and
broken long-term relationships can take so long to
get over. The first twelve years of your life may well
be in some perceptual fashion twice the length of the
next twelve.

Within this, different people have different time horizons.
For short-horizon folks, even in their mid-thirties a year
is long enough that they'll be a markedly different person,
while long-horizon folks are surprised that that ten year warrenty
is over already.

One approach I've seen mentioned is to think of time as geography.
Last year is a near by place, the 1970s much further,
and colonial times quite a ways off. There's a block of address
space occupied in time by your life, this is your city.

The usefulness of the approaches of course depends on just what you
are trying to use a sense of time for. Remembering to have lunch
or pacing the work of a day is a somewhat different, although certainly
related, problem than making sure something happens within a month.

Sunlight is a very good clock. If you work in the same place every day,
and there is a window, you can watch the light crawl across things, and
also see the seasonal change.

[madbodger.livejournal.com]

Welcome to my world. I've been like that all my life. Some people still don't believe me.

[leahseraph.livejournal.com]

I do all the long term stuff by association - why did they throw that party? Where was it? Was it before so and so moved? I used major events to mark things. For instance, I can date things to 2000 because they were before 9/11 and to 2002 because they were before I graduated from high school. Differentiating seasons helps too.

As for short term, it sometimes works the same way: what was I doing just now? why was I doing that? what was I doing before? etc as ways to check if I'm on track (either studying or in some complex fetch and carry task at work). There was a stupid computer analogy associated with this, but I can't phrase it so it makes sense anymore. The rest of the time I'm just scatterbrained.

[entirelysonja.livejournal.com]

I think the first step is to identify why this is important, and focus on remembering the things that matter.

I agree with a suggestion someone else made about "tagging' the important items in your mind when they happen.

Incidentally, I hate when I get calls from security clearance investigators, asking when someone started and stopped working for me, and expecting me to know the answers without consulting my notes. That is definitely not happening.

[nacht_musik]

Two things I found helped with my short-range time-sense.

First, I (accidentally) drove over my watch one year, and then didn't replace it. In the year or so after, I developed/calibrated my timesense by sporadically guessing the time, and then checking the actual time to see how close my guess had been. At this point, I have a fairly good timesense, *except* when distracted by computers (or good dates. ;-)

And to combat the computer issue, I've set up the clock on my workstation to beep every 30 minutes. It actually helps me tremendously in noticing the passage of time while at the computer. (I just realized that I never set this up on my mac. Now looking into it. :-)

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

a fine casio watch or other, set to beep hourly. don't like that? there are a few watches that will vibrate hourly. it'll calibrate you. oh yeah. my school had that system setup. every official clock would "zzzt" hourly (syncing system?) and after 5 years ... you could anticipate it.

hour not fine enough? there's probably products you can buy that zzzt, buzz, cheep at increments you prefer - certainly a palm pilot can do that.

as for longer term stuff... perhaps to find a book on memory and associations and such tricks. tying events to weather and seasons and times of day and people and so on.

#

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

For the shorter-term time-sense, I have a lovely meditation clock. It has a chime and I sometimes (whem I'm working on my comuter, for instance, just set it to chime every 30 minutes (or 20 minutes). It's a nice gentle sound, but can be amazingly surprising and revealing when I think "I'll only be a minute" and then suddenly the bell rings again.

For longer-term... well, for me it's been meditation. What happened was one day I saw a bunch of people in Davis Sq. holding up political placards. I was really confused. Why would they be doing that at that particular moment? Was there some kind of special election going on? A primary or a mid-term replacement? Then, suddenly, I realized that it was Novemeber and that the general election was in a couple days. I was terrified. What had happened? What had I missed? It was like coming out of a coma, and I was really shocked. That's when I started meditation practice. I realized I had been so wrapped up in my head, and in internal dialogues, that I had not even noticed the change of seasons. So I found a place to teach me to be more aware amd conscious of the act of being alive.

I still don't have a good grasp on things from more than, say, five years ago or so, but going forward from here, I hope to pay better attention as all the time.

YMMV

[xeger.livejournal.com]

I'm none too fond of things that beep - but I've set my background to change every hour (to some of Blatte's excellent fractals or Ben's knots) which is a nicely subtle marker.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I have the same problem... the best I can do is try and think of something else that happened around that time.

[bouncingleaf.livejournal.com]

For short stuff (ie 15 min vs 90 min), I've practiced guessing what time it is or how many minutes/hours have gone by, then checking a watch to see if I'm right. For really short stuff, I can sometimes think of it in terms of songs - if about 3 songs could have played (or did play) in that time, that was 15 minutes. Sometimes if I can remember what I did, that will give me a good guess. "We must have talked for 10 minutes about A, and 5 or 10 about B... oh yeah, in between there we talked for a long time about C, that must have been at least 20 minutes itself... and I think we've been talking about D for 10 minutes.... so it's been almost an hour." *check watch*. I also have certain standards that I can use to measure sometimes. A restaurant meal that is neither rushed nor drawn out is about an hour, for example. Once I know that, then I can guess that heating up some leftovers and wolfing them down was probably 15-30 minutes. And I can be sure that talking with a friend over drinks and appetizers, ordering dinner and taking our time with that, then sipping tea until we're ready for dessert... that is going to be considerably longer.

For longer stuff... my job situation, living situation, and lovelife have changed often enough that I can usually use these to navigate. "Okay, if I was living there, and dating that person, but still working there, that means..." If I ever settle down, I'm going to have to come up with a new strategy :)