(Over)seeing Time:
on Long-term Thinking and Internal Calendars

Image: Monthly meeting in January, photographed by Elliott who also added a small new feature to the bottom right corner of our website

Dear reader,

Hope you are doing well. Here at XP we’re feeling the winter, and it seems that for many of us our seasonal rhythms are not in sync with the demands of work/life; January was immediately full-on and — at least for me ● (Kirsten) — didn’t leave much space to reflect and envision the year ahead.

As XP we did however schedule moments to work on our future, defining and aligning long-term goals, dreaming up radical scenarios and in general dedicating time & energy to discuss how we can ensure to keep dedicating time & energy (keep the cauldron hot) in the long run.

Thinking long-term can be difficult and scary, but good, especially in this political climate. When I think about current events/shitshows, I tend to lose all hope for the future, while at the same time these developments urge me to consider how things might go/are going sideways and take action accordingly. Slivers of hope return as I’m seeing flocks of people steer away from the Big Tech bigots and look for more social ways of being online, or when we talk about building our own tools and creating other kinds of support structures in the studio and beyond.

So yes, many things to do and consider, which requires planning. Personally, I’m not great at long-term planning. It often happens when scheduling meetings with XP, or when a new commission comes in, that my calendar looks empty. This doesn’t mean I have nothing to do, I just haven’t time-blocked my schedule that far. When it’s a week that is relatively near I can gauge how busy I’ll be, but further away is when I can no longer sense what I’ll have on my plate, and risk to overbook myself.

Time blindness, the inability to recognise when time has passed or to estimate how long something will take, is I think what’s been keeping me from planning ahead more precisely. I can take long to nest myself in something, but then get things done surprisingly fast once I’m in the flow, which is the part I’m prone to vaguely remember and count when estimating. Since some months I’ve put systems in place to log how long things take and learn from it. Next step is to time-block the more accurate estimation prospectively along the year.

This is something to dive further into during one of the upcoming Digital Maintenance Days on calendars and time-management (→ see announcements down below), but before I’d like to use this newsletter to tune into our internal calendars and see in what ways we might intuitively/naturally perceive time in our mind.

Internal Calendars

Although I experience time blindness to some extend, I do feel I have a strong internal calendar and sensory perception of temporal elements. Time markers like numbers and the names of days and months have always had something about them: a colour, gender and personality of sorts. Growing up I learned that this involuntary perceptual phenomenon is called synesthesia. 

When it comes to my internal calendar, the scale of a year is visually most distinct. Monthly, weekly or daily mental views have been influenced too much by external tools, but the yearly view in my head feels very innate. It looks like a disc or a ring, maybe a bit like the Rings of Saturn, made of particles in orbit, without any visible entity in the middle.

As soon as I tried to draw it out on paper I felt a distance to the image, probably for how I am trying to map it out from a birds-eye perspective, while in my head the POV is down on the ring at the point that is Now. The ring is tilted slightly as I feel I am still leaning on the idea of the new year setting in, to the left of me (here the playhead of the Now runs counter-clockwise).

I can reflect on moments in the past and look at them from the present. Back in July-August I was swimming around sunny warm Procida, which in the cold grey Now feels far away, on the opposite side. When I zoom further into scenes from a certain time, like when we opened the studio in June, I am transported to that part of the ring. I can dial back the ring several years as well when I try to recall for instance what happened during the warped pandemic period.

Possible prospective plans can be imagined similarly, but are harder to grasp. I don’t think I’ve ever tried making a planner in this way, which could be good for setting general intentions and making vague plans for the year. However for actual/more precise planning on a monthly or weekly scale this mental view is not very useful. I quickly drew a circular calendar with the 52 weeks marked in it and could already tell it made the year feel more compact, as if it would invite more realistic planning. So perhaps my external calendar can learn from my internal one.

But enough about my own internal calendar; I’m super curious to hear how/whether others perceive time in their mind, so I asked my XP peers to describe in words and a drawing how they imagine the year ahead:

● (Emma)

Right now, January, I am at the bottom of an oval shape – egg-like perhaps – that’s how I see a year. It’s kind of like a road I’m walking on, and now that Feb is approaching, the road is curving up, making every day a bit more of a climb than the previous day. When I look all the way up, I see only glimpses of summer, blurry and far away, arching over me in a misty distance. Right around my birthday, I’ll be standing on top of the egg and it will be more of a sliding journey down towards winter:) and then repeat 🥚♻️🥚♻️🥚

My external calendar is week by week, I hardly ever look at the entire year in that way. Dewi did make me a foldable calendar of 2025 with 12 columns and days as rows, which feels very different from the egg-year, because when I look at it I can’t instantly see/feel where I am - I have to look at the numbers and days to figure that out. So maybe I need an oval year-cal with a little arrow I can move around it 🔺🥚 ?

⋇

● (Ben)

How do I see time? 

My first thought was that this year ahead looks like a road, but then I thought that time being a road feels negative and cliche and so then I tried to picture the year ahead as a river. Then that made me think that the time as river idea is probably far too idealistic and in reality time is going to look more like a road through the landscape. But I don't want to give in to the road so then I settled on my view of time as road that is running next to a river where sometimes the road is straight and without interruption and then other times the river spills over and begins to force the road to meander in alternative directions. What the road and the river represent I'll leave to the reader to decide.

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● (Jack)

For short-term/medium term I kind of just have flashes of images of a feeling or a kind mode I will be in. It is vaguely ahead of me. Time = Space/Distance. When I think of longer periods like January next year for example things begin to bend back on themselves and create a sphere of time constantly retracing itself.

Strange that I thought this made complete sense but when I drew it out on paper it looks as if the future is behind the past. In a way that is how it feels.

Calendars help me not because they match how I think about it but because they force me to unravel it and allow me to look at it differently. Like trying to discern some details on a scribble and then translating that scribble into one long line to get a better look.

⋇

● (Elliott)

When I closed my eyes I saw yellow and orange and a thin white line. At the beginning of last year, I kept thinking about time as a series of long and short loops. A moment felt more connected to the distant past than to the day before.

Something similar to this...

⏔
(Metrical Long Over Two Shorts)

Over the summer, it again felt like a series of loops, but the loops felt like they were gradually getting shorter, merging a bit

⎠
(Right Parenthesis Lower Hook)

This winter life slowed again. Imagining it is as two lines floating a question. Is the loop life over or is it just a pause in the rhythm.

≟
(Questioned Equal To)

In the last few days my internal clock feels slow but life is moving rapidly. I wish for the external clock to align with the internal.

≿
(Succeeds or Equivalent To)

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● (Gijs)

And on Jan 1 2021, I switched my handwriting from block letters back to cursive. It happened when I flipped the page of my year reflections. One side block lettered, not revealing any sign that the back side was fully in the romantic paradigm.

Cleaning my shelves #newyear I found this sheet next to two versions of my year plan for 2021. It was the year I wanted to finish my philosophy thesis so planning was important. Version 1 was a circle cut in 12 parts. A pizza. Around it I attempted to draw layers of plans (thesis, studio work, design academy work) and started to list chapter 1-5 for each of the first five months. It looked like how I want to picture time (cyclical, it even looks like a compass), but something didn’t really satisfy. It didn’t give me much of a sense of the year and when I'll be busy.

A new A4, in the middle a line from left to right, divided into 12 months. On the left a stack of my ‘brands’ in different colours – green supergijs, black G.L.A. de Boer (academic), red DAE, orange ‘gewoon Gijs’ – each extending into a heartbeat-like line that became more wild at points in the year where I projected to be busy. This was version 2 and it worked. While in my handwriting my modernism yielded to my inner romantic, maybe in timeplanning I embraced my inner modernist.

But I’m not sure I’m still happy with that either. My year imaginings are strongly structured by calendar use: a continuous horizontal timeline and when I think of a day I jump left or right accordingly. It works for planning, but is it really how I picture the year? How I want to picture it?

More than a line I’d like to think of it as a space, a possibility space. Not seen from the sidelines but looking right into a future’s cone. A road ahead that doesn’t converge at the horizon but opens up, in Hockney’s reverse perspective, to a wide Tempelhofer-style field. Indeed, romantic.

⋇

● (back to Kirsten)

Fun to see how others respond to this question. I would like to extend it to you, dear reader: how do you see/feel time?

You can send your descriptions and/or drawings to mail@extrapractice.space or share them in this are.na channel: https://www.are.na/kirsten-spruit/internal-calendars

Now over to our announcements!

XP News & Updates

Yesterday afternoon Ben/Varia hosted Social in the Media, an event about alternative social media, where we collectively took a look at different federated options such as the Mastodon, or smaller d.i.y. platform like Elliott’s special.fish, and helped each other get started choosing instances and making profiles.

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🌽 Emma is still farm-planning with her sisters, meanwhile organising their next Regenerative Dinner on Feb 9.

🐜 These days she’s also drawing lots of ants for an alternative banknotes commission, and started writing a report about our Telepresence collaboration with SWSWS69 in Arnhem – we’ll share that project soon.

🇳🇱 Emma recently started a cute informal Dutch class at XP; check emmaverhoeven.nl/dutch if you missed the intro, people can still join!

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Kirsten is hosting another Digital Maintenance Day next week about folder structures. Whether you are into the PARA method (📁Projects, 📁Areas, 📁Resources, 📁Archives), came up with your own spicy system or tend to throw everything on your desktop, you are welcome to come organise your files at XP. And while we’re at it, let’s pencil in the 3rd one as well about calendars and time-management!

📂 Tue Feb 11th: Folder structure (16:00–19:00)
🗓️ Wed March 5th: Calendars (16:00–19:00)

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On February 19th, Extra Practice will be moderating a panel as part of Design Biennale Rotterdam at Nieuwe Instituut. We’ve been invited by The Actual Main Institute (Maren Bang, Augustina Lavickaitė, Guus Voorham) to explore the relation between institutions and artists. Join us to find out where this rather large topic of conversation can lead!

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Join Gijs on Feb 25 19:00-21:00 for the first pilot session of self-model-making, an open research group on the production of ideas of the self. This session 0 we’ll plan the journey: share what interests us, draft a syllabus of what to visit in the coming sessions, and agree on the pace and rhythm of the group. More info on https://supergijs.com/researchgroup.html

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Thanks for reading! We wish you a lovely weekend!

xoxo XP