Durable dynamic systems have elements, or layers, that change at different rates. The fast layers that change quickly provide the innovation, while the slower layers stabilise and remember.

In his short article Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning, Stewart Brand gives this evocative example of the time hierarchy of a coniferous forest:

"Take a coniferous forest.  The hierarchy in scale of pine needle, tree crown, patch, stand, whole forest, and biome is also a time hierarchy.  The needle changes within a year, the crown over several years, the patch over many decades, the stand over a couple of centuries, the forest over a thousand years, and the biome over ten thousand years.  The range of what the needle may do is constrained by the crown, which is constrained by the patch and stand, which are controlled by the forest, which is controlled by the biome.  Nevertheless, innovation percolates throughout the system via evolutionary competition among lineages of individual trees dealing with the stresses of crowding, parasites, predation, and weather.  Occasionally, large shocks such as fire or disease or human predation can suddenly upset the whole system, sometimes all the way down to the biome level."

It's an example of his wonderful framework of pace layers which he applies as the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilisation.

Time hierarchy

The Norse Gods are still among us in the names of the days of the week.

Tuesday — from Old English Tiw, for Tyr the Norse god of combat

Wednesday — from Old English Woden, for Odin the one-eyed king of the gods

Thursday — for Thor, the quick to fight god of ordinary people with his magical hammer Mjollnir

Friday — for Frigg, wife of Odin and goddess of marriage and motherhood

While Saturday, Sunday and Monday follow the celestial bodies Saturn, the sun, and the moon.

As a wonderful introduction to the Norse myths and gods you could do much worse than the entertaining and beautifully produced Illustrated Norse Myths I was commanded to read by our 9-year old.

Illustrations based off of those by the excellent Matteo Pincelli.

Days of the week

Ever since I came across Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's concept of Flow it has stayed with me as a simple framework and beacon for finding joy, creativity, and total involvement with life.  

"What I 'discovered' was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us come to being happy."

When researching happiness Csikszentmihalyi found that be they climbers, ballet dancers, chess players, or gardeners, people gave surprisingly similar descriptions to how they felt at their peak experience while performing an activity.

When in flow people are wholly focused on the present moment, they experience a strong sense of control, they lose their self-consciousness and their ego, their experience of time changes so that time can fly by or a moment can seem to slow down, and the joy of performing the activity becomes an end in itself.

Flow has a fairly simple set of conditions which I find myself using as a little mental checklist:

When climbing, a prototypical flow activity, it's clear that you are trying to get to the top, you can immediately see if you are making progress and whether an action progressed you or not, and it's wise to pick a wall that is difficult but not impossible, for you to enjoy it. No wonder climbing can be so addictive.

By contrast, it was evident to me that none of these were present when studying for my PhD.

I also like flow because it reminds me that peak happiness is unlikely to be experienced by sitting around watching the TV.

The quote is from, Flow, the psychology of happiness, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who also taught me that any name can work to do great work.

Flow

In Manager Time a day is neatly sliced up into hourly chunks according to the calendar. Meeting someone is as easy as finding a free slot that coincides. You don’t have to worry too much about what you’ll be doing next as your calendar will tell you.

In Maker Time a day is an open book to get something hard and meaningful done. Even thinking when a meeting might be and remembering to go can distract from getting on with making. Long, uninterrupted chunks of time, not sliced and diced by meetings on the hour are ideal to make progress on hard problems and tackle something new. Even a single meeting in the middle of an afternoon can disrupt that long meaningful chunk into two that make it harder to tackle something big as you have to context switch and pick up where you left off.

Most modern offices operate on Manager Time. It’s great for meetings but comes at a cost for getting meaningful work done. If you’re a maker you may associate with the feeling that to get some real work done you feel you need to do it at the weekend, or in an evening after everyone’s gone home, when you’ll be free of interruptions.

If you’re a manager, consider your makers when you schedule your next meeting.

If you haven’t already, you should read the original article Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, by Paul Graham from whom this excellent observation is from.

Manager time, maker time

It’s easy to think “it’s just a few minutes.” But as the number of people that you hold up increases, the true cost of being late scales rapidly. Being 10 mins late to a meeting with 10 others is 100 minutes. Holding the door for 20s on a train of 600 people is over 3 hours of time collectively. Unless your time is worth a lot more than everyone else’s it’s worth thinking twice before holding the door to a train or not taking the start of a meeting seriously. I think, at the end of the day, it’s really about respect.

The cost of being late

This is the idea that people across history budget on average about an hour a day for traveling. Originally observed by Yacov Zahavi, it came from the observation that even as our means of transport sped up, instead of traveling less each day we would just travel further. As in the sketch, this leads to a conclusion that the size of our cities increases partly according to how efficiently we can travel in and out—they generally increase to a size that maintains about an hour round-trip journey.

Cesare Marchetti observed that Greek villages and ancient walking cities, for example, as marked by ancient city walls, tend to share a radius of about 2.5km. Walking at a typical 5km/hr that makes an hour round trip journey. He also pointed out that: “Even people in prison for a life sentence, having nothing to do and nowhere to go, walk around for one hour a day, in the open.”

Unfortunately, if you live in London, the average round-trip seems to be an exception of 1h30.

This is also known as the constant travel time budget hypothesis.

Also see isochrones. It might be interesting to look at these according to transport method…

Image adapted from: Marchetti, C., 1994: Anthropological Invariants in Travel Behavior, Technological Forecasting and Social Change , 47 :75–88, Internal Publication, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

Marchetti’s constant

A super simple method to help you get your tasks done. Named after a pomodoro (tomato) kitchen timer, the essence of it involves considering in advance how many pomodoros you might need for what you want to get done, setting your timer for, normally, 25 minutes and then focusing on your task until the time’s up. Then take a 5 minute break. That’s one pomodoro. After you’ve done four pomodoros take a longer break, of about 30 minutes.

Protect your pomodoro from distractions — make sure that you spend the full 25 minutes on your task. If people want things let them know you’ll get back to them after your pomodoro.

Properly break in your breaks — no sneaky working.

It’s flexible, not rigid. If you need longer or shorter times, that’s OK. It’s about what helps you focus.

You only need a timer, but there are a number of simple apps that can help if you want to try it too, like this nice one with a bear: Bear Focus Timer.

HT: Ryan MacGillivray. The Pomodoro Technique ® was created and named by Francesco Cirillo.

The Pomodoro Technique ®

Are caused by the Earth’s tilt. As the Earth goes around the sun, the tilt of Earth’s axis — 23.5 degrees — causes at different times of the year, the two hemispheres, North and South, to be either tilted towards the sun or away from it.

In winter, and closer to the poles, because light from the sun hits at a greater angle, the solar energy gets spread over a larger area. This makes it weaker, and cooler and gives rise to winter.

In summer, and closer to the equator, light from the sun hits more directly and so is concentrated on a smaller area making it stronger.

The tilt also means that the number of daylight hours is greater in the summer than in the winter, and hence the amount of time it gets heated, which also contributes to the seasons.

Seasons are reversed in the two hemispheres, so if it’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere it’s summer in the Southern and vice-versa. The further from the equator you go, the bigger the effect of the seasons. So, temperatures in Ecuador stay relatively constant throughout the year, while the poles experience extremes of 24-hour daylight or 24-hour night and great freezes and great thaws.

Seasons

People in the last year of a decade, say, 29, 39, 49, 59, are known as 9-enders — a term from Adam Alter and Hal Hershfield. While it could have been that one year is kind of like the next year, Adam and Hal propose that as we approach the end of a decade we are more likely to do a kind of meaning audit of our lives. And in the years just before the end of a decade, if we may have fallen short, or feel there’s something else we want to accomplish, we’re much more likely to do it then than in any other year of a decade.

In practice, as Dan Pink shared in his book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, these are, therefore, the times when we’re more likely to do something extreme like running a marathon for the first time and, sadly, also committing suicide.

Read more in Dan Pink’s Atlantic article: You’re Most Likely to Do Something Extreme Right Before You Turn 30, Dan Pink, The Atlantic

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Dan Pink

People search for meaning when they approach a new decade in chronological age, PNAS, vol. 111 no. 48, Alter and Hershfield, 2014.

9-Enders

From the prefix iso meaning equal and khronos meaning time it literally means equal times. And whereas maps are usually put together with lines of equal distance you can either construct maps, or overlay maps as here, with lines of equal time. The overlay view gives you time contours rather than, say, altitude contours. Handy for checking things like commuting distance. I like how you find little islands where there is fast transport in and out like trains or planes.

You can explore time maps of London at mapumental.

Isochrones

It was only relatively recently that I realised that the transposition of day and month that each does, also translates to the written out form. So in the US it’s common to say April 1st, whereas in the UK most would say 1st of April.

The most convenient way for most dates on a computer is yyyy-mm-dd however, so they always sort easily. You may have realised this when adding dates to filenames. Though a lot of software uses UNIX time which is, as you would expect, is “defined as the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), Thursday, 1 January 1970, not counting leap seconds." So midday on the 12th March this year (or March 12th) at midday is of course 1426161600.

Sketchplanations tagged with time