I was watching a video on Insight Timer about internal clocks and our sense of time. The speaker was talking about how some people seem to have a very loud internal clock. They instinctively know what time it is during the day without needing to check. Other people don’t.
What struck me was that not only do I actually do know what time it is most of the time (within about 10 minutes and without looking at my watch) I’m very good at sensing whether it’s morning, afternoon, lunchtime, or “I should probably have left ten minutes ago.”
What I’m not good at (complete crap actually) is what I’ve started thinking of as “big time.”
I lose track of:
what day it is
what week we’re in
what month it is
how long ago something happened
Sometimes something from three weeks ago feels like it happened six months ago. Other times I’ll talk about something from 2019 as though it was practically yesterday.
I can think I last spoke to a friend a couple of months ago, only to find out it’s years!
How can someone be good at sensing time during the day but terrible at tracking time across life?
But I don’t actually think it’s a contradiction anymore.
I think there’s a difference between having a sense of passing time and having a structured mental map of time.
I seem to have quite a strong sense of short-term passing time:
how long something has taken
whether I’m late
when something is “about now”
the rhythm of the day
But calendar time is different.
That’s more about mentally placing events into structure:
Was that last week or last month?
Is Easter soon?
How long since I spoke to that person?
Have I been “just about to start” this project for six weeks or six months?
I’ve started thinking of it like this:
I may have quite a strong internal rhythm clock but a much weaker time map.
My brain tracks lived time better than administrative time.
And as a busy businesswoman, my life contains a lot of overlapping projects, conversations, plans, deadlines, ideas, events, emotions, and half-finished thoughts all happening at once.
That creates what we might call time crowding.
The brain stops neatly filing things into linear order because too many active threads are running simultaneously.
So instead of experiencing time as:
Monday → Tuesday → Wednesday → April → May → June
it can become more like:
now
not now
recently-ish
ages ago maybe
future fog
And I suspect a lot of people with ADHD, stress, overwhelm, creative brains, or simply very full lives experience this too.
It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re disorganised or incapable.
It may simply mean that our brains are more tuned into flow, momentum, emotion, and lived experience than into neat calendar boxes.
Which is probably why external structure helps so much:
visible calendars
reminders - on paper
seasonal themes
routines - if you can manage to hold one!
planning systems - paper or whiteboard
weekly resets
What I find essential is having a physical calendar for the year with key events and then monthly and weekly calendars to keep tighter track. I also had a lot of trouble marrying my vision of the calendar with what I could buy or find online to print out. So I asked Claude to build my my own!
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