https://www.seanmcdonald.xyz/p/tradcal-mindset-the-ugly-liar-problem

Solution Design Requirement 1) Gratitude mindset.

I am personally grateful every day that I exist. I am grateful that consciousness emerged from the stardust. I’m grateful that it happened in such a way that I can enjoy the world around me — and the other conscious beings who exist at the same time as me. We have near infinite capacity to travel, to experience, to explore. Almost anybody can learn to juggle. Almost anybody can learn to fish, and go fishing near them. Almost everybody can learn to garden. Most things are actually available to most people. It’s culture (and money) that keep them from trying a broad range of experiences. And in many cases, money isn’t as limiting as it may seem.

Solution Design Requirement 2) An honest calendar.

You’re gonna die.

We’re all gonna die, someday.

Every hour you spend is a deduction from a total.

Solution Design Requirement 3) An aspirational calendar.

Sundial will be responsible for a renaissance-scale event in giving people the ability to be the best of themselves in their work, their life choices, and their relationships all through optimizing time-consuming life problems. Because commercial vendors benefit from this growth cycle at a broad scale, in a time of existential need for new business models, the model we have will be a competitive investment asset in perpetuity.

//

Try Sundial. You might be surprised by how mapping out your whole impacts your perspective on how you live today. It’s free and easy to start.

https://app.sundialcalendar.com

Sean McDonald is building Sundial to live in a world full of people living great lives.

This is a stack of screenshots from six of the world’s most popular calendar apps, stacked on top of one another with opacity lowered to see them all. Welcome to The Grid.

Carbon floats through the universe. Billions of years. Energy vibrates it.

Consciousness emerges. Eventually conscious beings realize this is what happened. We awaken, probing into our past. With that sacred gift of time, we organize things in a grid, which repeats forever. Most of the grid goes to productive income generation, for most of the consciousnesses. The rest of the grid goes to consuming and watching things.

The grid is an ugly liar. It’s visually ugly. And it’s lying. The time it pretends exists does not. There is no Tuesday. It’s the Queen’s time. There are not 24 hours in a day. There could be 312 hours in a day, if we all agreed. Tomorrow morning, we could have 1 hour days. You work for about 35 minutes each day, in that model. It’s an effective lie — sort of — as long as we all pretend that a clock in Greenwich, London is and should be the central point of time. That's legit how it works, today.

The grid is a coordinator, not an achiever. We live in stories, fluid mental states over our lifetime of identities, often sitting beside one another. Many things are achieved by coordination. Manufacturing facilities need people to show up at the same time. (For now.) But we have profoundly overfit our consciousness to coordinated time.

Let’s not forget the grid is ugly. It's just a grid of squares. It’s not how I see my budget of conscious hours.

This mindset - traditional calendar mindset - is an enemy I’m naming TradCal.

TradCal Mindset.

NPC's are non-player characters in video games.

TradCal living is the embodiment of NPC mindset.

TradCal is an absurd pitch, if you lay it out.

Do you want your model of time to never ever change? Do you want to repeat the same exact thing for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? We’ve got something for you! It’s a grid calendar. Welcome to TradCal, where your life is a grid, designed to serve the people with whom you coordinate, mostly for income.

What’s going on in your life? Doesn’t matter! Don’t sweat - TradCal keeps on going no matter how you feel, what the weather is, or what’s going on in life or culture. If a government needs to shift around your calendar, no problem! TradCal is fully compliant and honors all local, regional, and corporate time constraints.

Don’t want to think about your own mortality or the preciousness of the gift of time? No problem! We never mention it. Most of the time, TradCal keeps you focused on the week ahead. That’s what matters, you.

If you don’t use TradCal, how will you comply? The Grid offered by TradCal is easy to mimic. So, externalize your conscious experience to a coordination grid. It’ll be easy to do commerce. Done learning in life? Join TradCal now. Get a timed job. Enjoy your two weeks.

The way out.

Looking for a way out? Try Sundial. You might be surprised by how mapping out your whole impacts your perspective on how you live today. It’s free and easy to start.

https://app.sundialcalendar.com

Sean McDonald is building Sundial to live in a world full of people living great lives.

The essay that follows is an attempt to bring science fiction - storytelling about a data structure - into an operational, open source software project. As a design or set of specifications, this essay is insufficient and incomplete. This is a story about a data structure. This essay proposes new software tools for the data structures we use for time, including the replacement of timestamps with graph objects that have universally coordinated durations, and the establishment of Clock Zero, a decentralized, singular time anchor, and a normalizing time format translation system called xpayz time. All of these ideas emerge from one belief: institutions will not eternally control time itself.

The clockchain can be for time what Ethereum is for contracts and governance, or Bitcoin is for money and currency. In this way, it could be a universal nuerome, the way Ethereum is a universal computer and Bitcoin a universal bank. The nuerome reveals our true nature: we are a set of individual souls who are also synchronized in layer after layer of subgraphs of mimetic memetic superorganisms, including the prime graph, an emergent, singular superorganism that integrates humans, and our digital analogs.

The following quotation does a succinct job of explaining what inspires me about working in the time space. My next steps for the clockchain are to circulate this essay, then host group chats and calls. After talking to prospective collaborators, I intend to setup bounties for multiple developers to participate in building a prototype. This is a side project from my work at Sundial, which I intend to be the first adopter of the clockchain into an app.

Sean

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Francis Bacon

Act 1: It’s time for a distributed consensus approach to time.

The scaffolding of the human experience is our contemporary consensus structure for time.

At first, consensus was endogenous. For hundreds of thousands of years, Homo sapiens roamed as nomadic tribes, fully regulated by time of day as a framework of circumstance. They did not have a synchronized point in measured physics. The safe time of day to eat was when there were no animals around, nor lightning, nor hungry Homo sapiens there to compete for food — not noon. Lunch couldn’t be for 60 minutes, as minutes were yet to exist. When to go to the bathroom? At urgency, again checking circumstance. To sleep? To mate? Mostly when the weather and sun allowed, and — again — circumstance.

Then, for millennia, agricultural clocks regulated human behavior. Crops and livestock, as well as herds to hunt, regulated society. Some cultures were still regulated by these patterns when my grandparents were born, although they become fewer by the year.

Time was something of a magic phenomenon, both irrefutable, and unregulated. Over time, civilizations started to use the giant lunar clock in the sky, and to make use of shadows to divide time. Sundials emerged. Then hourglasses. The Mayans and many other cultures built elaborate temples to align with the patterns of the sun, and the days within. From Stonehenge to the Temple at Karnak, solar worship reigned eternal. Thousands of years later, candles were mass manufactured in such a way that they burned for exactly an hour, or exactly eight hours. When the candle was out, the time had passed.

Soon, control of time became power. Over a long history of different time models - including ones where hours change in length based on season, and other localized mechanisms for tracking time - great leaders emerged in institutional structure, and they took control of time. In the end, pharaohs and kings, railroad companies and satellite companies, religions and governments — they are all participating in an eternal jiu jitsu match, grappling with one another over who determines what time is. Even in 2022, hundreds of legislators debated changing time for hundreds of millions of people, at a random point in the shared timeline that small group choose and mandated. Now, in 2023, there will be no more daylight savings time in the United States, and subsequently in corporations around the world.

All of that sits on what is so obviously true from a first principles perspective: time is what we make of it. This essay is a proposal to make time distributed. Distribute consensus has emerged as a fundamental tool on which humans build the future. Time belongs on a set of distributed tools, not in the volatile hands of whomever is currently in power. Those who provide the mining services, the code, and the governance over the clockchain will be responsible for establishing a new era. We will be the keepers of the timeline, if you will.

Caesar’s disassociation from the moon.

Caesar’s most enduring feat was, perhaps, to disassociate us from the clock in the sky. There’s little evidence that, prior to the change to the Roman lunar calendar, anybody had given thought to making an abstracted human-designed calendar that didn’t recognize the lunar and solar cycles. In 46 BC, the Julian reform of the calendar was introduced. We have used an algorithmic leap-year-accounting calendar ever since.

Why did he do this? Perhaps because he thought it was scientifically more valid, but it’s more likely that it was to seize control of all of the systems of documentation, especially in ports and receipts. By changing the calendar, his empire’s workers all knew if they were dealing with someone conforming to the empire or not, based on their calendar. If it was 12 months and 365 days, they were already acculturated; if not, they soon would be changing calendars, perhaps at sword point.

Caesar essentially forced everyone to switch from indigenous time to government time. Like forcing a switch from linux to corporate-controlled operating systems, a time time model forces every single interaction for everyone everywhere to adapt and comply, or be left behind. Or worse. History may be written by the victor; but the future of time itself is also written so.

Calendar reform - and the battle for determining time and schedules - was just getting started. Rome would prove to be the garden not just of Caesarian time, but would also yield, in the exact same place many years later, Pope Gregory VIII, who would change time yet again. The Gregorian calendar is the twelve-month leap-year-corrected calendar we mostly use today.

This reform had the astonishing feature of deleting the days October 5th through 15th that year to make the new leap year model work. Everyone complied — and showed up for mass on time that weekend, right?

Today, a rich Wikipedia page is filled with calendar reform efforts. Gurus and zealots, religious leaders, and scientists alike have all tried to solve for time. But they never solved for adoption or adaptation, and we mostly use the Gregorian calendar in the Western and financial worlds, and just two or three other principal calendars, perhaps most notably the Chinese calendar, as most other alternative calendars are religious in nature.

We are at Kuhn’s crisis.

In his seminal work, Thomas S. Kuhn documents how science changes, from his perspective and data set. It’s a sequential process where drift from the original model and taxonomy used in a type of science - or in our case, all science - has fractured or faulted. Time theory as we apply it today is riddled with faults.

For example, who among us believes that humans on other planets will agree to use the Gregorian calendar, forever adapting their way of life to terran time? We know it won’t work in any sustainable way. Days on Mars need to be days on Mars, not some absurdity where settlers wake up irrespective of local night and day to stay in sync with a planet so distant it takes minutes of delay to communicate from one to another. They will have their own time, and the time we need to prepare for this reality hastens, as humans will soon live on alien planets themselves.

It may seem like cell phones and GPS have given us global synchronized time. They have not. They’ve given some corporate boards and military satellites high centrality in information networks. Could your cell phone provider change your world by changing your clock, to, for example, make a minute 59 seconds? Yes, the could. That is not to say they would, but to highlight only a handful of humans have an actual mechanism to track time that doesn’t depend on an institutional authority disseminating it.

There are multiples times at play today. There is Lunar Standard Time for things on the moon. There are multiple time models for satellites, all under the categories of time bending realities stemming from gravitational time dilation. Time is faster further away. Movies have made this famous by showing a year on one planet being a day on another, and the sense of emotional loss that stems from that if your loved ones age a year while you spend a day away.

We have lunisolar calendars. These include the literal moon and sun; as well as a vast range of religious models of time. The Chinese calendar; the Solar Hirji calendar, an Islamic calendar; the Hebrew calendar; the Celtic calendar; the Ptolemaic Egyptian calendar; the Babylonian and Ancient Macedonian calendars; the Japanese, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Korean calendars; and dozens more over history.

People still use sundials.

Farmer’s almanacs, folklores, and indigenous parables all offer unique models of time. Some go so far as to imply there’s a day after the day squirrels start making louder sounds while chewing acorns, and that’s when you should harvest fall crops.

Video games have their own time; and own dimensions of time. Some games are emerging with features like clocks that respond to how fast you move — further breaking and bending the rules of time.

Amidst all of this, most computers are doing their own thing on synchronizing time. They check in, phone home to corporate time synchronization. Servers handshake time signatures. But the rate of loss and data problems is incredible. Time series management data is a necessary ingredient in sensor and IoT-based business models as well as many of the emergent structures within AI research. New time models will open new doors in AI, and we’re in an early stage of working at the scale required to address time itself.

Time reporting is a mountain of problems. Are employees honest? Are devices working right? Do honest people using properly functioning devices understand the time logging software? Are incentives such that time management correlates to time tracking? Does any business of a threshold scale of growth have thorough knowledge into how time is spent?

Races are won at the time when using an analog film race camera, sometimes still in use, based on a mind-bending intersection of physics, photography, and timekeeping where the film and the photo and the photons collaborate to mark a bit of spacetime, completely un-synchronized to any other global source of time, but commemorated by light trapped in special paper.

Are the clocks in your house right? What about after the power goes out? Do you set them all to the same millisecond? Do they line up with your neighbors? If you live on a state boundary, does someone in shouting distance to you live in a different time zone?

How much of your time tick tocks away each day, mindlessly scrolling social media?

We’re stuck in the era of fuzzy, disparate time models. We must unify our time model to a single time model to be prepared to be solar system citizens. We must fix our broken model of time to enable people to be as they blossom, not as they coordinate with precision.

That’s not to say precision isn’t important. The model of time proposed in this essay would be the most precise ever made.

That’s why it’s time to mimic a scientific revolution. Time for a new time.

Our time models fails to reconcile identity.

New models like DAO’s will bring some fairness to how systems are formed; but still provide a highest-bidder-takes-the-prize approach to governance, in many cases. Validating that a human did things is the real identity, even beyond biometrics and institutional verification processes.

A new time is coming. Perhaps a new era, culturally, but I mean literally — a new model of time itself.

Time is a permutation, co-evolved as an idea, a memespace, perhaps, that with Homo sapiens provides an invisible structure to our mental models. Time surely (?) passes, and we know that to be true intuitively; but we don’t typically apply a meta scrutiny to our day-to-day interactions, questioning whether our model of time is the right one. Our tools reinforce this willful ignorance of obvious faults. Calendar apps don’t offer a “work off the timing of the lunar cycle instead” button for Tuesday meetings.

“Sally, can you meet at sunrise on the new moon? We have a new HR software system I want to train you on.” It would be fun, and funny to most. To some cultures it would, perhaps, feel just right.

As a child I spent time on the Dineh reservation in Northeast Arizona, and things started when people got there. I found it “weird” and confusing at first. Now, a part of me still longs for that way. It, too, had it its faults. Try repairing a roof whenever the crew gets there; dealing with stores that open whenever the owner arrives that day.

This tension may appear to be part of a battle that’s already won. We appear to be on track to use the Gregorian calendar forever and ever.

But on a first principles analysis, we know it won’t be forever forever. Our models of time have hardly held on for generations, being devoured by more efficient mechanisms and tools of time. The sundial was replaced by the church bell; the bells by clock tower; and now nearly everything by GPS or time derived by the rate of decay of radioactive materials.

Today, block height or start / finish blocks signify time as much as institutional time. Many argue that bitcoin is the best way to track time; I would position bitcoin as a principal validation node in the clockchain + DTI.

The design requirements for something new.

Distributed time.

New and extraordinary things have emerged from software. Bitcoin has established a reserve currency that is plainly a revolution in plain sight. Ethereum has established a global supercomputer that can run on wildly disparate types of hardware and be programmed by anyone with very minimal functional society around them. Distributed media is going to enable censorship-resistant information sharing. dApps will make our virtual selves the earnest possessors of digital goods.

And now, it’s time to do for time what has been done for money, computing, and media. It’s time to distribute time, taking away the queen’s Greenwich, England time.

Honesty about time as a scarcity mathematical model.

A grand trick of the calendar is to present a user interface that treats a scarce resource as renewable. Need more time? It seems like you’ve got tons in here, there is nothing here. That’s not true. You have to go to the bathroom many, many times during those open days. You don’t have most of that free time. It’s on you to record every single detail if you want to see your real time.

Time is not renewable. It’s scarce. You get a set amount of it, and it’s shockingly predictable how much you have, within a modest range of error. Every hour you spend is a draw-down from a set bank account. Your calendar is a time budget.

Structure to support the extremely long list of first principles derived realities about time, activity, and human potential.

You aren’t going to live to 7,000. You might live to 200 in a flight of imagination. You probably aren’t 3 years old reading this. You probably have about 15-50 years in front of you, if you’re reading this. If you are reading this in the future, I hope you have 200 years in front of you. That’s still not much on a cosmic scale though, and is easy enough to map in a database.

This is true for actions and activities, as well. Nobody has eaten for 900 hours consecutively. Nobody has meditated for 4,000 hours consecutively. Women don’t have babies in their late 80’s. Men don’t finish triathlons at the age of 18 months.

Same for relationships: no couple is married for 2 minutes, nor for 200 years.

A sidenote on fate, determinism, and free will:

A natural consequence of modeling global first-principles time models is that the limits of free will quickly conform to a parameterized and filtered set of free will options. At my age, I cannot become a fighter jet pilot, nor can I go back and spend more time walking my kids in a stroller when they are tiny enough for strollers. We have free will within the limits of physics — and millions of operational nuances.

We should have fun with that, and perhaps we extract a new philosophical model based on evidence at scale from the late stage clockchain?

It’s all the things we can really do, not all the things. All the possible realities, not all the realities.

Proof of Human Time: Low trust and no trust validations of time.

PoHT

Which is more valuable: a social media page about your professional identity where you say you worked someplace for 5 years, or a graph-validated quasi-Bayesian model of social proof verifications that someone showed up at an office for 5 years, with twelve first degree validators, and three types of paid independent validators? Math is on the side of the latter, in a dramatic way.

The clockchain has to have Proof of Human Time (PoHT) to create an honest and earnest record of time that can last in perpetuity for all future time. “History is written by the victor” can fall quickly to PoHT of our shared objective reality.

The Deep Time Index: a central record of all known time.

Because humans are applying an artificial, human-contrived time system on top of what we call Planck lengths of time, not monitoring and tracking something that actually exists, we need a central ledger of what we call time. From millisecond 0 to millisecond omega. (1)

That record can include entries from very specific to very fuzzy. Perhaps a quantum physics lab records a reaction that took place for 100 milliseconds, and records that time range. Perhaps a colleague confirms someone does a task for 100-200 hours. That is also placed in the DTI. The end user accessing it can determine what types of events and what level of time granularity is necessary.

Human actions will be the most common entrant, so the time in the near future and near past are the most important to early adoption and success. People can record that they did something for 100 hours, like a training program, and get it verified by colleagues. Because that record references the DTI, it is clear for eternity when that person did that thing, with very high statistical likelihood that it’s true. It can easily be cross-referenced with other data from the DTI to check for credibility. Did this account ID report contradictory simultaneous accounts? Then it’s a bogus record. Many such exceptions can be made, with a very important one being fraudulent creations supported by scam networks who serve as validators.

Validators and reputation.

The clockchain infrastructure requires a different type of validator. There is a classic blockchain validator, which is checking the math of the records, system integrity, etc. This is critical for the clockchain, but more types of validators are needed.

This is a monetization engine for the clockchain. Validators, in many cases, can get paid or otherwise benefit from supporting the clockchain. Software with API’s like fitness tracking systems can offer to serve as a validator for exercise. This wouldn’t enable the user to report to the clockchain just based on that validation, but instead for the user to report using another person to validate first, then using this API as secondary support.

Paid validators must include formal time tracking. Colleges and universities can validate a student’s time in a lab. Employers can validate employees’ time. It should be that objective measurements can serve as validators as broadly as possible. If a marathon management company can push data from their tracking system and stopwatch system so runners have eternal proof of their time spent and time achieved, they should be able to do so as easily as possible.

Further paid validators could be identify verifiers in the real world, who attach private but verified identities to accounts.

Before any of this, the most simple validation is asking one other person to validate that you spent that time that way. The system has to start there and be based there.

Validator reputation ranks.

There is good reason to do reputation ranks, perhaps both Ethereum miner style, and Yelp style.

The fee structure could, perhaps, encourage good reputation. The better the reputation the more pay you get? Too simple? Maybe a model like the higher your reputation the higher your power to pipe revenue with autonomy, including some to yourself. i.e. you get paid X amount of ETH to validate and store in a blockchain distribution all graphs in the DTI. But then you get a pipe of revenue to control, perhaps to reward other users, to fund recapitalization and investment cycles, to increase hardware capacity, stake for future protocols, etc. So the model is reward persistently, and direction and management progressive to reputation.

Bounties on validations.

Imagine a situation where a clockchain entry supports a trigger that pays a bounty based on a certain validation. Perhaps an employer pays 1 ETH to an employee who gets a personal trainer to validate 100 hours on the treadmill, with the secondary validation coming from the treadmill app account?

Time apps. tApps.

tApps will emerge as products that can write to or read from the clockchain.

Imagine a job interview for a master carpenter position at a prestigious Miami design firm, where the employee will handle thousands of dollars of woodworking per hour, installing cabinets in yachts. Two candidates with the same basic qualifications apply. The job starts tomorrow, due to someone quitting by surprise yesterday, leaving a crew two short, not just the one position that was open. The employer receives a resume with references from one candidate. The other candidate provides a clockchain entry validating 10,000 hours of woodworking with dozens of validators. Which person would you hire if you were that manager and had to hire someone right now?

tApps will enable low-trust and zero-trust interactions that require that someone spent time doing something; or that some time was spent somehow. Many types of calendars could exist, ranging from payroll problem-solving to altogether replacing most training that isn’t tested, like corporate training where there is no final quiz or exam. Beyond those practical and enterprise use cases, there are infinite benefits to science.

Imagine a geologist trying to understand what was happening in another part of the world at the exact moment a rare worm fossil was buried with volcanic ash in the dirt in its belly, preserved that way until today. With the clockchain, a query tApp will be able to pull all geological events from the bracket of time ranges possible, and get ever more specific about how things are all interconnected.

tApps in the legal domain will be a full-fledged revolution. High validation alibis, records of business transactions, proof of acceptance, and so on.

I can imagine the most powerful apps combining government-backed contracts with the crypto-backed contracts that require clockchain validations to trigger bounty payments. These tApps will replace a lot of HR work, for example.

Universal converters. It supports cognitive diversity about time.

There’s nothing about the clockchain and the Deep Time Index that requires the inputs to be stored in Western / Gregorian time. A popular tApp will be a converter API that takes any time format and puts it into clockchain / DTI format, and vice versa. Converting from Hebrew time to Brooklyn time should be a snap; converting from Honk Kong Chinese dates to San Francisco Gregorian dates will just be an API call or a simple function in a standardized open library.

Space ready. XPAYZ time as a reconciliation algorithm to find matching time points on other clockchains in the future.

To reconcile the clockchain with the variations in time across the galaxy, and in this example, the moon, we need a clockchain-compatible algorithm set.

A core model will be XPAYZ time, which can convert lunar time to earth time easily. In theory, it handles any two disparate time modalities, ideally normalizing time units, accepting for and accommodating Planck lengths, but maintaining the dramatically more workable and earth-system-compatible (99.9999% of all systems) milliseconds as clockchain default. In that way, I dream of the clockchain as the lingua franca of time for all time, and hope you want to be a part of starting that as much as I do.

The name signifies this: x = payz

X = Time in a new format.

P = Permissions. Inbound data from one or more sources and outbound data from one or more sources may have different permissions systems. For example, a user may encrypt their clockchain entry using plain text. A XPAYZ hook will check all of this before decrypting and sharing with what may be a public entry.

A = Adjustments. This references as set of adjustments in time scale. This library will grow over time. One example is converting “days” to “milliseconds” which could include multiple types of days. Another adjustment could be going from lunar time to Earth time; or going from satellite time to ground time. Lag is a classic adjustment, with minutes between communications between Earth and Mars, as a practical example. Adjustments can be called in sequence, and should be able to be forked.

Y = Why? Why are you doing this operation? Determine the type of output. If Z is in Gregorian time, Y would include a variable to convert to Chinese lunar time, for example. This includes category taxonomy and notes. It must include rules for formatting final results, from am/pm vs. 24 hour to text encoding type. This should be called from a library of results.

Z = Ze’Time. The initial clockchain entry or query set.

Any entry can be run through a XPAYZ time adapter and come out in a new entry envelope that presents the entry in a different format. These are not new clockchain entries, but functionally child nodes with only limited access possible.

From the defense industry to day-to-day calendar operations, a core part of the clockchain protocol has to be shortcake XPAYZ time codes that enable rapid implementation in functional sandbox and production code stacks, worldwide.

(It may be that the clockchain and DTI have to be forked in the future to move to some better measure of time. In this case, the whole system will rely on a colossal XPAYZ time conversion. As such, it should be considered not just a practical tool, but the source of portability that protects the whole system.)

Consequence attributes. From homo economicus to PoHT powered economic models that are honest calculus, not clever statistics.

A sub-node of a clockchain entry is a consequence attribute. For example, did a certain amount of time earn a certain amount of money? While this could be a bounty, the meta data tracking, for example, how much was earned per hour, is a separate outcome. Tracking emotional outcomes, financial outcomes, and physical health outcomes enables PoHT to be tied to a new type of learning about the consequences of our behavior.

Forking behaviors increases our rate of knowledge attainment and effective mimicry.

We are mimic monkeys and need to be able to fork each other's effective behaviors to our calendars the way you patch a new library into code.

We live at a time of profoundly increased needs, expectations, and capacities. But we need the healthiest, most open approach to mimicry we can have. That involves transparency about allocation of time and capital. Clockchain and blockchain, arm in arm.

Accessible to all.

Layers of clockchain entries must be private and only visible to key holders. Key holders should essentially have multi-sig access to secrets within public entries.

At the same time, public entries must be accessible to anyone using the protocol, any time, any place.

Generates fees / Self-sustaining

Validators, commercialized tApps, and submission / mining fees are all required for the ecosystem to flourish.

Managed by a DAO. The keepers of time memorial.

The clockchain should be managed by a DAO. Those members will probably use an ownership coin independent of the clockchain to regulate governance.

That governance should include how much time the member has filed working on the clockchain on the clockchain, as well as how much they actually utilize the clockchain, and how much use they bring to it. It is likely a centrality score that best indicates that user’s moral rights to stake and control within the DAO.

Perpetual, emergent and self-updating.

Because the clockchain will last for all time, which could be what is to a human eternity, it needs to be perpetual. A grid down or another problem should not disrupt it any more than the blockchain.

Emergence may be increasing it its complexity, if we are in fact in a system with assembly theory at its core. Conceivably, the clockchain will have some impact on our notion of time itself, and thereby must continually update to reflect our model.

The clockchain code should consider that multiple clockchains may already exist in other galaxies, and that we may need to recognize seniority in integrating our clockchain with an obviously superior version. Its also possible ours is the superior and will need to ingest a different form of data, such as time measured at the molecular level rather than the conscious level. In that case, individual atoms experience linear time as perpetual reincarnation and conceivably different rules apply.

Practically, what this means is simply that the clockchain is better off taking an unstructured data approach to secondary data appended to time, and taking careful account from day one of how to convert to Planck-length time. This is probably a long-term collaborative project to handle floating point complexity at the hyper scale of Planck numbers.

As an important note, the clockchain should be prepared for the advent of mathematics that fall into three domains that could impact time storage: the progression of mathematical theory towards equivalence instead of equality in handling numbers, potential for quantum projection similar to Randonauting for geolocation for time and calendar functions, and radical changes in perception of Deep Time that may be enabled by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Vetted by consensus before implementation. Test chains from day zero.

An advantage of an open source DAO model is establishing vetting and consensus structures.

Test chains have to exist, and side-chains may be possible. Perhaps there is an incentive to become a verified side chain through some massive action, like a thousand users verify that you should be verified?

Fraud detection and moating by doxxing validators.

While fraud detection will be essential; it’s also possible that the nature of the clockchain and Bases-like emergent eigen-structures is that it’s very hard to commit fraud programmatically if a certain amount of users and validators are doxxed. While this enables identity detection on the clockchain, in theory, it would be non-obvious and a hack of the system to do so. Many validators will want to be doxxed, such as universities, or martial arts training centers.

Open source, with technical explanations for lay people kept persistently up to date.

The integrity of the clockchain requires that highly skilled technicians maintain its code, it requires that people like lawyers and judges, all types of professionals, even spiritual and community leaders — that they all trust the integrity of the system. Communications is a core tenant of maintainership here and things like real-time visualization dashboards should emerge as early tApps to promote clear understanding of the benefits of the clockchain.

Open API. Stable sidechain duplicates and archives.

It’s critical that the clockchain core software provide an open API. From XPAYZ time conversions to tApps, the API is the system.

What’s different is it probably requires a secondary service to convert from clockchain-based time protocols to all the others; and that probably has to persist across all variables. Similar to an ETH to USD model, but with dozens more parameters, thus orders of magnitude more diversity in possible results.

In this way, huge amounts of processing can be done client side; but many things need to be processed in advance, especially to optimize computing time and to avoid negative environmental effects from brute force processing of records in a blockchain.

Perhaps API’s rely on sidechains which tap the main chain from day one? It seems dramatically more computationally efficient.

A global time ticker.

The system must provide a persistent, perpetual, free API to let anyone anywhere get the time, at all times.

Ability to vault time. Protect yourself with a contract for free time.

Imagine clockchain-based contracts, combining Ethereum and government contracts that synchronize to protect your future time by giving it a contract to yourself. Surely, no employer can take that from you?

Meme into production.

No protocol or service can thrive without having a personality, in the new market to come. The clockchain is full of jokes. From referencing rappers famous for wearing clocks as necklaces, to stodgy old white dudes whose clock chain is attached to a pocket watch — it’s a branded stack that can have fun with itself.

Mindset requirement: we have plenty of time to answer the questions.

Creating the permanent record of time memorial will take some meaningful percentage of that time itself. Maybe it’s 1%. Maybe we can get it down to .001% or even small enough to see meaningful gains in my mortal lifetime. In any case, it is an inevitable technological step on our path to wherever it is we are emerging.

So, to conclude this introduction, I leave with this question:

How can clockchain entries be bulk populated using historical data, so that we achieve as much of historical data recording to the clockchain as we can in our lifetimes? What types of AI’s can do that?

Act 2: How the Clockchain will work functionally, and faux code snippets.

There’s a long history of clock chains. Be it the heavy, custom-weighted and gauged clock chains of a bell tower, controlling timing themselves; or the chain holding a precious timekeeping device worn by the privileged of certain generations, their pocket watch.

Proof of Time requires MG + Clockchain Submission

A Bayesian graph of how you spent time. You - or someone else - says person A spent time on Activity Z. You may be person A, or not. You say you spent 100 hours working on Sundial. Then you send that to me, person B. I look at it and I either say no, suggest a change, or I approve. If I approve, I can also send a request to my wife, person C. She validates not that you spent that time, but that I have spent time on the same thing, my 1000 hours on Sundial.

So we end up with 4 nodes and 4 edges, a complete triangle with one branch. That is a minimum eigenvector compounding into single point of centrality, or in broad conceptual terms, a sort of cousin of a minimum Bayes graph; which in this case, is the activity of working on Sundial.

(This raises the question if our data structure needs a non-person actor -- a company basically? It's not an Activity or a User, although it could kind of be a fork of a user?)

Once a minimum graph (MG) is established, it serves a Proof of Time (PoT). The broader the graph gets, the more powerful the software grows, and the less likely it is that it's untrue. Of course you can commit fraud, but it's very hard. We can use ETH wallets to validate, for example, that it's a person who isn't making tons of entries.

I believe we could pretty easily build an index of all time. Start with say 10,000 years ago and build up to 10,000 years from now. Build a central index of time, and have MG's attach to a time period in a single, centralized time database. Like Wikipedia, a person can go in and say that dinosaurs existed from x milliseconds to y milliseconds; another can say T-rex was in North America from x to y; another can say a sub species was in California from x to y; a paleontologist can say a specific skull was from x to y.

It's 6.31152e+14 milliseconds, which seems a storable amount of data these days. By having a single time record and timezone irrelevance, it slowly becomes the de facto record of time. The more MG's point to the Deep Time Index as a reference of shared objective time, then put time zones and other human adaptations on top of it, the people have to use it. Eventually a whole legal system could be built on high validity MG's stored on the clockchain referencing a shared objective Deep Time Index.

A lot of people say Bitcoin is time, and they are right, sort of. But, really, time is time.

The Deep Time Index starts with our current range of time.

While clockchain MG’s enable entries from any point in time, the DTI features need to be scoped to the functional time that’s relevant to most user. That is, in most cases, within the past year or next year; or within the past lifetime or next lifetime. The range of use cases - practically - outside of those ranges become science, speculative investment, and creative applications.

In this light, the DTI will need these initial features:

The need for dti_Prime to be established, and operational goal of clockchain + DTI development.

Like GMT, dti_Prime is a reference point that other references points are based off. Just as most software uses GMT+/- systems to track time zones, then appends labels to those, dti_Prime+/- allows a single point of reference.

dti_Prime is also clock height zero, when that millisecond arrives — sometime soon.

Maybe Clock Zero should take place at some specific moment, like a solar eclipse?

The Deep Time Index is, in part, a derived, emergent taxonomical structure.

By providing and updating - likely via popularity contest algorithms - the taxonomical structure of the MG labels, the DTI can first analyze what people are submitting, then navigate disambiguation by offering an emergent definition called in real time to clockchain queries, as well as the initial taxonomical label and the user written label, should it differ.

Implicit integrity check.

duration_ms == stop_anchor - start_anchor

If that doesn’t computer, it’s a corrupt entry. This is one of many such back-checks the systems needs.

Time allocation overlaps as an integrity monitor, and as a another model derived from the DTI.

Clockchain MG’s need to overlap. When we drive somewhere and listen to music, we are both driving and listening to music that whole time. Each MG can have precise integrity and overlap.

Because of this, the DTI has to be able to reconcile how much time an activity takes. In the example of driving and listening, let’s imagine someone who is active in the military reserves of their nation, and needs to listen to audio updates provided by squadron leaders, in conjunction with mission briefings. These “internal podcasts” have to be registered on the clockchain for tracking, and a convenient way to do that is carpooling with other reservists and listening on the way to work.

The ability to discern that both actions were possible, and to what extent they each consume time, is a key abstraction from large scale clockchain data; and perhaps, and key set of guesses to calibrate the system prior to launch. In this case, it’s plausible that the recordings were listened to, the reservists inter-validate they participation, and for mileage reimbursements, all also validate drive time on various employer accounts each year. Is this fraud? That’s unlikely, for reasons already established.

The DTI needs to create multiple feedback loops to assess each type of activity in a broad taxonomy of activities. Activities in the DTI themselves need emergent boundary conditions, established by a combination of statistical patterns in the data, and logical boundaries established in queries trained against the DTI, as well as its meta data.

ADPRS format: Waveforms as precision expression of time behavior.

Because many activities occur on a regular basis, or some recurring pattern, the clockchain data schema enables an object to drill infinitely down on the specificity of a behavior. While a user or developer could, in theory, put a separate entry for every time they do yoga, it would make the DTI wildly inefficient, both practically - especially for queries - but also from an energy use and computational (thereby also real) cost basis.

In the example of doing yoga for a year, a clockchain entry might best be expressed as something that took a year, with the start and stop times the beginning and last class of this activity. Rather than store every activity in between, the schema uses the following structure to record recurring behaviors:

Asymptotic (A) variable

A represents whether or not a behavior stops; and if so, on what curve. Some behaviors, like breathing, take place at a “1” — meaning that they last until your final breath, without ever stopping. Some, like doing yoga for a year, have a decay to “0” because they end.

While 1 would be forever and 0 would be fully stopping when it stops. The closer to zero the score is, the more unattainable the event is, in most cases. For instance, solar eclipses would be A = 0 because when they are not happening, they are definitely not happening. Something like watching television may be A = .5 because describing watching behavior is describing something that stops, but sometimes does not.

Duration (D) variable

This is the unit duration of an instance of an activity. It can be input as a static amount in xx.xxE+y, or can be derived from the start and stop anchors. This can also be externalized, or erratic. It should accept structured exceptions, but not unstructured.

Period (P) variable

Distance is basically period. It’s how far between events is mandated by the nature of the event. For example, New Year’s Eve can only arrive once every 365 terran-Gregorian days.

This is stored as a function of how many events there, which in turn can be divided into gross_duration, the total amount of time for the graph object, which is derived from start_anchor and stop_anchor — this derives R, recurrence.

This is stored as a simple number. The count of instances.

P = x instances.

Recurrence (R) variable

Recurrence is the amount of milliseconds between each object; and holds several exception states, which is why it has to be recorded, not derived on demand. The first exception state is when the event recurs on an external pattern. This would include holidays. Some on an institutional calendar, like Christmas; and some on solar calendars, like Easter. The second exception is when the recurrence is unknown or to be determined. There are likely more exceptions.

This is recorded in xx.xxE+y format, again, with exceptions:

R = ! signifies to be determined

R = ? signifies unknown or unknowable

R = [logic] signifies that recurrence will take place when some external event takes place, for example some other incomplete clockchain event

Spread (S) variable

This is a self-reported - and possibly derived - metric of how precise the APR model is. When S = 1, the APR model is exactly right. Something happened, recurred, and stopped exactly as described. Imagine an event where two world leaders meet for one hour and never meet again, with massive amounts of n>3 degree deep validator graphs. Then, on the other hand, when S = 0, it is highly imprecise, and the mid range of S = .5 might be some reliable but faulty model. In that case, some person obsessed with tracking their behavior might record that they run for an hour a day and can prove it with their watch; but the time is all over the place, and the clockchain submission is not of such importance that each run needs to be an individual clockchain graph.

It’s unclear how to recursively derive this; and equally unclear how to derive it consistently in any such way. Perhaps the DTI v2 includes a mechanism to weight S? Perhaps it is as simple as standard deviation of the incoming data, or some other simple and friendly analysis model?

Or perhaps (S) and PR are miscategorized in schema assignments, and S should be the social ranking of the contributing node?

By our powers combined.

ADPRS is the formula to make a wave form. Similar to synthesizers, the raw input data of the activity combined with these behaviors turns time models back into the waveform that they truly are.

Calendars have told a lot of lies, but the lack of acknowledgment of the wave properties of time is, in my opinion, the most ignoble.

Graph query or AI? Both.

DTI queries could be simple; or DTI queries could be complex graph conditions. Does the clockchain + DTI require a unique query structure? Perhaps not, as many graph search models have now become - basically - black box AI functions.

This is hard to discern without testable models to learn from. New models of language and AI together with DTI data will reveal the best search models, I would expect.

Compatible time models.

The list of compatible time models is by definition infinite, since the clockchain + DTI will exist as long as things exist, in theory. But the important ones for a v0 prototype are:

XPAYZ Time - All branches

Gregorian Time - 24 hr and am/pm

Sundial Time - human-lifespan personalized time

Sundial Time formats - milliseconds —> clockchain

Time Layers - two or more time models with a synchronizing function

Time in Space - galactic, solar, and geo positioning coordinates of the timestamp

Recursive meta data.

Records its own time of recording a network and a cohort.

Cohorts are strength. The more inter-referential information the blockchain MG provides, the better. This is especially true in time stamping when the entry was made, which should be an account of the highest centrality time validation possible.

Perhaps streams of all the nuclear clocks, etc. are brought to a unified place that serves like the international kilogram for time, and that must be tapped. Perhaps it syncs across all devices active on the network at that time.

The emergence of meta-consensus time. The L1 of time itself. The timestamp to replace all timestamps.

In practical terms, we need something better than we have. What time is it? Who knows. It could be just about anything. Either the sun is facing you or it’s not right now, that’s for sure.

As the clockchain becomes active enough, and validators for “what time it is” exist across billions of entries, a new strong emergence phenomenon arises — a consensus time with statistical majority consensus for human time.

We will never perceive Planck lengths, and they are nonfunctional units of time for Homo sapien consciousness. AI’s will need to understand this. The clockchain and DTI enable that.

Eventually, the clockchain becomes the L1 for time itself.

This means the clockchain + DTI drip of the dti_Prime+x = now timestamp will be the timestamp to replace all timestamps.

Faux code -- a full clockchain graph object.

clockchain create minimum graph { 
      user_id: xxxxxx 
      user_note: lorem ipsum
      cumulative_time: YY.YYe+Z
      start_anchor: dti_Prime +/- AA.AAE+B
      stop_anchor: dti_Prime +/- CC.CCE+D
      waveform: [ADPRS code] 
      active_duration: FF.FFE+G
      anchor_validator_class: [select list] "bitcoin"
      anchor_validator_start: [secondary anchor] "block height"
      anchor_validator_stop: [secondary anchor] "block height"
      user_activity_label: [text input]
      user_dti_taxonomy_label_select: [search select]
      validator_graph_i: {matrix of validators and statuses}
      validation_score: [calculation]
      linked_user_ids: {hhhhhh, jjjjjj,...}
      clock_height: kkkkkk
      {{object_id}}: [callback from clockchain]
      {{emergent_dti_label}}: [callback from clockchain]
      {{shortcode}}: [callback from clockchain]
      {{legible_code}}: [callback from clockchain]
}

user_id: This could be many types of unique id of sufficient complexity, but it should probably start as ETH / BTC wallets.

cumulative_time: The clockchain’s core unit is milliseconds, as this is the smallest application within the short tail of time uses. of coures microseconds, nanoseconds, and up to megaHertz and gigaHertz are used throughout computer - and all - science, but the vast majority of practical applications use millisecond or larger time units. If there is an employer who tracks paid time in milliseconds, it is surely for some anomalous reason, and costs quite a bit in overhead to manage. There’s no reason a xpayz time transformation can’t take place to the main chain, should the tDAO approve the conversion, so it could move from milliseconds in the future, just in case.

The system will require a protocol for handling floating point choices, and many such protocols exist as precedent. It’s probably better to keep to “hours” on the left of the decimal and “minutes” on the right side, so a human can read it at a glance. That means transforms would have take place for each input, or that a standardized format emerges. This is probably true throughout.

start_anchor / stop_anchor: Each moment needs a start anchor. That anchor critically synchronizes with all the other entries. This enables the DTI. A microservice converting “current time” from whatever source the data stream is coming from into start_anchor and stop_anchor format will be very helpful.

The format is similar to GMT+/- time formats. Evolving from that into a dti_Prime+/- format enables consistency across all software systems.

waveform: [ADPRS code]: This data contains the waveform pattern necessary to model behaviors and time itself as waveforms. As earlier described, each variable has rules and unique components.

The format is {A,P,RR.RRE+x,S}, or, as an example: {1,2.71e1,10,3.14E+10,.5}

A = 0 through 1

D = DD.DDe+G:

P = i

RR.RRE+xe.g. 12.34E+10 milliseconds

S = 0 through 1

anchor_validator_class: [select list]: An anchor validator is the third-party reference point used to validate not the graph but the anchor. In most cases, something like a reference to an API to a nuclear clock, or block height on Bitcoin will be sufficient to record when the anchor happened on some point external to the clockchain + DTI. This ensures the entry synchs to globally recognized times, and maintains the health of the clockchain through constant comparison.

_start and _stop are stored in the indigenous time format of the validator. As such, using exclusively crypto block heights and nuclear clocks might be better.

user_activity_label: Taxonomy is the trickiest part of the DTI. While the clockchain has no requirement for consistent labeling, the DTI is built upon a taxonomical structure that allows strong emergent functions. Many of the most powerful functions of the clockchain + DTI come from seeing how whole populations spend time, and to analyze that data - even with the best systems - some categorization has to take place.

It’s critical that the user be able to have freedom of speech when it comes to submitting labels. Just as entries to all blockchains contain dark or horrible things, the clockchain may be spammed; but the incentives are low, if existent at all, for the worst kinds of things harming children or whole populations.

user_dti_taxonomy_label_select: At an inflection point of scale, the DTI can be used as a recursive self-informing source of taxonomical structure. The user can start to select descriptions and labels they agree with easily and quickly.

I may release a taxonomy to kickstart this process, which has been designed and funded by my private company. Perhaps the clockchain enables someone to benefit from the taxonomy they provide, when other users fork it they pay some fee to use it.

validator_graph_i: There are many types of validators, and each type has a simple graph. At minimum, a validator graph has a

validator_id -- The clockchain id of the validator.

validator_timestamp -- The clock height when the validation was recorded.

validator_value -- 0 to 1 value representing certainty.

validator_reputation_rank -- 0 to 1 value representing recursive reputation of validator’s use and credibility, likely through centrality scoring.

validator_method -- Initial options should be human judgment or trust, smart contract, external validation with proof, and consensus. The first representing “I said so” - basically - and the second relying on something like a photo proving an activity being done, then the last simply listing other user ids that subsequently validated it.

validator_method_proof -- For validators that have proof, either an explanation or something like a url to a photo serves as proof. It’s possible the clockchain needs file storage or some type encoded file snippets to manage proof of validation.

validator_reward -- Smart contract to reward payments.

validator_legible_label -- Human readable label or title for the validator.

validator_notes -- Because validations can be very imprecise, there needs to be the ability to explain what’s happening.

Each validator can be expressed as a {x,…,y} entry. It’s also possible the clockchain needs two types of nodes; Activities and Validators. Any user, presumably self-validating the entry precipitating their participation in the clockchain, is a Validator.

There is no reason there can’t be a very large number of validators, but there should, perhaps, be a limit on the number of validator graphs that can be linked. Over-linking the nodes of the DTI dramatically increases the computational cost of graph queries, and in that way over-linking is not helpful. Perhaps there is a statistical threshold after which more Validator graphs are not contributing much, chasing an asymptotic curve that never reaches 0.

validation_score: Because the validation graph structure is complex, a simple score will contribute a lot of functionality to the DTI. This should be a centrality score with “weighted force direction” (not exactly, more recursive, but similar) based on the compounding strength of the validator graphs. This score incentivizes growth in validator networks. Each user / Validator may have a recursive score derived from this, aggregating their score across all entries, so that the higher integrity the higher integrity.

linked_user_ids: Because many activities include multiple people, this value store allows infinite additional users to validate they participated. There must be a system for unclaimed user accounts.

(One of the most fascinating aspects of the DTI is that a person’s whole life could be mapped out by others, and with inference graphing, a full model of that person may be derived -- without them knowing the clockchain exists. That’s unlikely, but it’s plausible as a thought experiment.)

clock_height: Because the clockchain is a blockchain, it has a block height. This is recorded with each entry.

For fun, it’s called the clock height -- a reference to the clock towers built by monarchs, which the clockchain evolves past. As a metaphor, Clock Zero is taller than the tallest royal tower.

{{object_id}}: Received when the graph is submitted.

{{emergent_dti_label}}: As the DTI begins to have an emergent recursive taxonomy, labels can be appended automatically.

{{shortcode}}: Because computer programmers don’t want to starting putting complex in their databases to replace the old standby local timestamp, each clockchain entry needs to have a shortcode entry that complies human time. This is a GMT+/- time/date code; possibly two; possibly multiple.

{{legible_code}}: Because humans read human time, this simple function states the label of the graph and how many hours and how many years the activity takes place, cumulatively. For example: yoga_100_1 would signify yoga, for 100 hours, for 1 year. This references the emergent_dti_label.

//////

Missing from all of this are Miners and the data structures Miners need, including payments. That is an intentional omission, in part because it’s unclear what type of hardware best mines the clockchain + DTI; and mostly because those interested in pioneering this work should have a voice in the structure from the first moment of public discussion. I will share my opinions when the first meeting of prospective Miners takes place. The same is true for paid validators who might build a model off of validating, similar to how notaries public make their livings in the US.

//////

Minimum Graph and xpayz time API.

Because the full graph is onerous for many uses cases, especially for app developers wanting to push clockchain entries out of their existing model, which is unlikely to include so much information when they decide to do so. A minimum graph approach should be accepted, with a simplification and possibly bifurcation in post types. An “mg” is the equivalent of using an address and note pair on an ETH payment.

The best mg may be:

user_id start_anchor stop_anchor waveform

Act 3: PhD vs. PoHT

Ecosystem / Protocol

As a clockchain + DTI emerges, a large portion of early adopters will be academic. The correlation abilities of the DTI to any data set - combined with cultural comfort with statistical models invoking Bayes-like certainty, centrality, and inference models - makes an ideal use case. Many of the best developers still participate in graduate research, and researchers across all fields want to carve our their role in the crypto revolution.

As such, a great early market to approach is academic use cases. The first is to circumvent the institution and create social-graph-validated models of credentials.

The PoHT vs. the PhD.

As a thought experiment, imagine a world where only one credential can be presented on hiring for a top tier staff engineer at a big tech company. In 2025, would a candidate be better to present their PhD from the University of Maryland, or to show a peer-validated network of 3,000 hours of coding time on projects in the past six years, with all the validating nodes being students or staff of the university. Would the smart candidate provide that clockchain-verified Bayes-like history to this company built on computer science and AI research, or a piece of paper signed by an institution head?

Let’s explore why the smart candidate will use the clockchain + DTI records.

Time tracking with integrity.

It’s easy to lie, manipulate, change, or cheat about time. What percentage of time tracking is honest? On first principles, manual time tracking through paper or digital entries is rife with consequences. That, in part, is why students are tested. We credential not what gets done, per se, but a long chain of small moments of human judgment on the part of the instructor, the institution, and the student.

Because of the mechanisms discussed as Bayes-like in this essay, fraud is hard in the clockchain + DTI. Spam detection is heavily-reliant on Bayes functions to work so well, which should serve as ample proof to merit the hypothesis it will work here.

Social media sites about work are a joke.

Having a page with a glamorous headshot of yourself, listing all the places you’ve worked, amidst a sea of tech company recruiters, and AIs designed to grasp your attention — that is a solution for a better phonebook, one that has a TV in it.

Proving how you have spent time leads to an ocean of insights.

Can a person keep doing the job of mowing lawns for 30 years if they don’t know how to mow a lawn? Can a person be ignorant to how a surgical operating room works after 1,000 verified hours in one? The answers to both are likely no; the broader their graph of validation, the more certain the no.

Over time, the clockchain + DTI becomes a trustworthy source, where other platforms are built on truths that are, at best, castles made of sand.

Exciting new types of market models.

The range of new market models ranges from replacing PhD certificates to changing the way professional sports are telecast. Imagine a professional athlete’s stats including their total game and training time, as well as a score of how likely those stats are to be true.

Imagine a history channel that explores one millisecond in history each episode. The DTI enables anyone to grab all these events in a query.

Imagine a legal system where legal assistants - like stenographers, paralegals or dossier developers - have a new skill set of sourcing validators for alibis.

Imagine a calendar that shows you as a character running along a limited slice of time eternal, rather than a perpetually renewing empty sheet to fill in each week end.

Taking time immemorial to time memorial.

The clockchain is inevitable. We can - and do - record a lot of our lives and activities. Digital copies of us exist write large. Most big companies have one of most people in their markets, at this point.

Our time is recorded.

Also, we now know that all time exists. We can perceive and visualize what has and will happen, with great certainty. Thinking, social species evolved before us. Dinosaurs roamed. Supernovae will explode in the future.

The phrase “time immemorial” is purported to have emerged over a thousand years ago in English law to refer to time outside of known time. That no longer exists.

The clockchain + DTI are the inflection point of intellectual evolution where we stop pretending we can’t know most things, and begin to take account of all time.

The power of sequence.

We tend to analyze time as thought time spent has direct consequence. Going to the gym builds muscle. But really, eating the right food before and after, sleeping the right way, and so on — it all compiles to a sequence of performance outcomes, not a one-to-one set of behaviors and outcomes. It’s matrix to matrix math to look at inputs and outcomes in life.

In this way, time as a mechanism of AI in fields like bioinformatics can look not just at behaviors, but at sequences. A superstructure like the human genome could emerge, like the human action-outcome model map. But that’s probably more of a thought experiment for now, until clockchain + DTI data exists at such scale an AI can be trained to consider how this might really be implemented.

Immutable time. Immutable opportunities to learn from one another.

The library at Alexandria was burned many times. Gold has been stolen from many empires. Land, the same. We are at the dawning of a a new ear of things being immutable through scale of distribution. The clockchain + DTI offer more than a record of time. By correlating outcomes to the entries therein, maps and models of how humans succeed and fail can be derived, analyzed, and crystalized into new plans that are most effective. Everything from business strategy to meme crafting can be back-tracked to behaviors that spent time.

This protects the legacy of learning across time better than any monolithic store of information. The clockchain + DTI thus protects our knowledge, as a species, and as consciousness emergent from the stardust.

As previously mentioned, this also accelerates our ability to mimic effective strategies, further enabling the best actions at a time where environmental changes threaten mass migrations and permanent supply chain restructuring.

The clockchain, the DTI, and the multiplicity of times in the metaverse.

As time takes place on different scales, we will create infinite branches of time. New VR games use movement as a clock. Some use external clocks as clocks. Some set time on other planets.

As these experiences and accomplishments become more valuable as digital goods and avatar add-ons, as well as NFT’s and other proof of ownership models, the time spent to do them, time spent winning, losing, collaborating, even using a certain weapon or spell, does too — the need for timestamps that are smarter soars.

Rich with digital assets, and able to be up at any of the 24 hours in a “day,” the metaverse is not tied to earth time. Gamers have, for decades, played into the early morning hours, with other gamers on the other side of the planet, hitting the game during a lunch break. They exist on — for now — server time, not a central synchronized time. That server may itself synch to a centralized time, but only clocks at precisely the same altitude, and possibly inside the same stratification of the magnetosphere, are truly synchronized, otherwise the millisecond and the second are, a fine resolution, very rough consensus acceptance of an equivalence of functional time units, not an equal measure of the same thing.

VR also inevitably creates metaverse-time. The clockchain + DTI is the bitcoin to that fiat.

DAO participation and PoHT.

Many DAO’s already reward human time through provable actions. Promote your DAO - two governance points, tokens, coins, or whatever denomination it may be.

PoHT can decrease and, in rare cases, end problems endemic in the world of DAO’s. Nepotism and controlled / slow drip information release enables people to reward real-world friends and trade favors in launching DAO’s, protocols, and currencies.

PoHT can show work and commitment instead of Discord popularity.

A tApp like Sundial can show how much of someone’s life has gone to that DAO, which should be a meaningful metric, as much so as their budget.

The inflection point of Unreasonable Effectiveness of atomic networks of time data stored in synch at scale.

Each viable minimum clockchain post to the DTI is valuable unto itself as a PoHT asset; valuable to the DTI in revealing more of the shared synchronized time record; and is a slow contribution into something like a savings account, which will threshold one day to the point that things that are unreasonable to derive from one record will be easy to derive from millions or billions of records.

For example, how much time does it take to start a startup that succeeds, given the history of the founder, the market conditions, the industry type, and so on? Given one clockchain post to the DTI, it’s absurd to wager a guess. But among the billions of entries perhaps thousands of data points exist, from which a complex sub-graph can be filtered.

This sub-network continues to exist as it did with in the whole, but can be isolated for computational focus; many types of inference and prediction graphs can be used to manipulate these data from there.

Perhaps the holy grail - by which I mean object of desire that may or may not actually exist, not the thing on which we should focus - is to derive perfectly crafted products designed based on market needs found in the DTI.

What if survey participants in basic science had to validate their behaviors out-of-lab in the clockchain? What would social sciences become?

Imagine that someone has to self-report behavior in a psychology research assessment that is part of a multi-year study. The person isn’t living and working from a lab, so self-reporting of how they behave is critical.

The clockchain requirement of time report means the person has to build a quasi-Bayes graph of social proof about their behavior. Fraud patterns are likely to occur, and to be caught in many cases with basic detection.

Years later when the findings of the paper come into play, it’s not a question of how honest the participant “seems” but how high a score, but of some metric like clockchain reputation + sub-graph of reputation into a centrality score, to determine veracity of reporting.

Did a researcher actually work 10,000 hours in the lab according to themselves, or according to a three-deep network of validators with high reputations?

My favorite daydream about the magic of data synchronized on the clockchain is to root out synchronicities and make them clear. Does the social science of economics actually have the answer to a recession, or can the business school’s market dynamics research from the exact same time periods offer more clear trajectory-mapping? When we backtrace and back-propagate models that can coordinate off of a central handshake of shared, reconciled time frame, we can build a new model of research where a quasi-open centralized database exists not around subjects but just around time itself.

Immutable ledger of action.

We have immutable ledgers of money.

We have immutable ledgers of computation.

We do not yet have immutable ledger of human action.

This represents a new legal system, wholly acceptable within the current system. What once was an affidavit is now a series of six-tier deep validations of behaviors built by a defense, offering an alibi with a hypothetical nine zero’s of statistical certainty.

People can say anything. At a certain scale, the DTI limits what they could have plausibly done. In fact, it eliminates most things. A person who has never been on the clockchain and does not show up in the DTI will still have to reconcile with all the things adjacent to their actions.

For example, someone cannot claim that they were at a restaurant when no clockchain entries exist from that restaurant in the past ten years at that time of day. No record is needed to know what time they are open, past a certain amount of data.

Voter fraud would be nearly impossible through clockchain-style ledgers that include multiple identity checks. In cases like some from the distant future intergalactic economy, you are the sum of who you are validated to be. How could any institutional verification out-perform that statistical model of certainty of identity? (2)

AI time structures in emergent time models.

Time is emergent on top of a framework of priors. That network is both discernible and can be inferred, to a large extent.

Current AI research accounts for time in linear models; not a singular model. But surely the particles that make up the screen on which you read this were doing something when the dinosaurs roamed this world.

A synchronized universal time exists, we have just not started using it.

To a machine, our carbon atoms are temporarily human.

What sets of human assumptions will be wholly replaced when multiple AIs are analyzing time-synchronized petabytes of data? “Economics” will seem like a cute joke, early Homo sapiens pontificating on their behaviors with rudimentary data. The butterfly effect should be able to be put to the test, at scale, with substantial-enough AI.

Molecule-level tracking for Assembly Theory.

In Assembly Theory - as loosely referenced for this essay having nothing to do with it (surely poorly), the intellectual equivalent of a baboon trying to open a coconut - consciousness emerges at a threshold of priors, a level of trailing aggregate complexity or interconnectedness.

The clockchain and DTI - in theory - enable tracking of individual atoms or molecules, on their journey across time. Then, perhaps, their centrality score would be the measure of potential for consciousness?

Or perhaps that’s all wrong and the clockchain + DTI prove it? We’ll see.

Integrations as force multipliers of clockchain + DTI input and output pace to scale.

tApps are novel things only possible because of the clockchain + DTI.

Validators are integrated with the application in its roots.

Integrations are third parties that play nice, and have mutually-beneficial goals. As discussed, DAO’s are a natural fit, and are inspiration to the clockchain design. New protocols are of most interest to me as partners, so to speak:

While apps may change over time, a few of interest today are:

Proof of Attendance Protocol PoAP. This allows event organizers to prove attendance. It’s already permitting into “honorary” ones that organizers give to community members who miss events, and so on.

Superlocal and CityCoins enable different levels of stacks where people can earn tokens, NFT’s, and similar digital assets by being places.

Of course, Ethereum is a natural tie-in to use clockchain records as timestamps, to use XPAYZ time conversions across planets, and to settle time scales on bets, for example. Bitcoin is, in its own way, as pointed out by many before me, time. The minting and proven work cycles are time scales unto themselves. Perhaps XPAYZ time converts to chain height at timestamp or some novel conversion like that to serve as a dually-immutable hyper-graph of authenticity of some moment.

Gifting entries as NFTs.

Users cannot permission ownership of their clockchain entries with other users, other than as activities that can be forked to be repeated — templates to reuse, basically. But users will want to share in some cases, just as cultural artifacts. In this case, they should be able to mint their time as an NFT. Perhaps it’s a grandfather giving his grandson his time climbing Everest; or a mother giving a daughter her first startup venture round closing as a memory that inspires her daughter in her new job managing a billion dollar fund; or something more sentimental, like a last moment together of long-lost grandparents. Or a famous athlete receiving a gold medal for 3 minutes.

It’s a creative ocean of options with that kind of feature, and early efforts should focus on where these things create joy, more than value, in my opinion.

Epilogue: Time is love

The Time Distributed Autonomous Organization. The tDAO. The DAO running the clockchain + DTI.

From the Way, one emerged.

From one, two emerged.

From two, three.

From three, all things emerge.

—Tao Te Ching, verse 42

The leadership structure of the tDAO needs to be based on a deep commitment to and deep incentive for the integrity of the DTI. Rather than being the equivalent of Bitcoin maximalists, the keepers of this timeline will emerge into those responsible for the structural integrity of software, human coordination, and new structures of thought, philosophy, and science. This should not be governed by an elected board, but by a consortium of differing interests. Similar to checks and balances, the clockchain and DTI need systems to maximize the benefit of integrity and scale to all stakeholders.

These mechanisms should be formed by consensus within the TAO. One such mechanism may be that the centrality scores are integrated into all functions. This could enable, as an example, paying higher validator rates to validators whose users refer the most validations. This in turn motivates validators to design, tailor, and market their services to those users most likely to grow quickly in scale. Age-out mechanisms of rewards ensure ongoing opportunity and lack of access to perpetual market dominance tactics, which could erode the integrity of the system over time.

Perhaps a scenario emerges where many factors add bias to rewards. Integrity of clockchain filings; integrity over time; link-backs like eigenvector reference scoring used in search; redistribution of share efficacy; participation in other community points-type systems; or even efficacy of governance proposals or some other measurable but subjective contribution.

The best thing is probably a Proof of Work for the system; and Community as another domain. Perhaps these are the two houses of commons in voting. One ruthlessly mathematical; the other chaotically human.

The way of the tDAO should be gentle, yet immeasurably strong. Time crystalized down to a true abstraction, perfect in the way that each moment can be a full and complete story — yet able to grow and permeate and emerge complexity upon complexity to reveal yet another focused lens by which we can understand the reality in which we operate this system.

Time Guardian NFT’s.

The first 100 supporters of clockchain protocol and DTI will receive Time Guardian NFT’s. I made this art, bending time. It shows dozens of portraits of people, with one collective human experience emerging across time. C’est la vie.

This NFT signifies you as a keeper of the timeline. As such, you will receive access to unique and important discussions and events.

The Clockchain™ and Deep Time Index (DTI)™

It’s critical protect Intellectual Property in order to honor the TAO, in this case.

In the open budget, a percentage of engineering and legal resources go to this work. The tDAO owns all.

Time, as expressed in the artifacts and infrastructure of society, should be courageously honest about scarcity, artifice, and the limits of free will.

Time is scarce. Time is limited. Time is brutal. Time is now. We don’t know what time is. We make up time. There is nothing in the laws of physics that requires a sexagesimal system (60-based), nor is there anything in physics, nor biology, nor chemistry that dictates that we can’t contrive some entirely new model of time, using perhaps 12-based systems of hours, where minutes are about 5 of our current minutes.

All of these are strange truths to consider when you think about your life, your work, your time with family, or your bank account. But all is time, and time is all. Most of us care more about time than anything; and when people lose their ability to cherish their time, we recognize it as a mental health problem, not a logical conclusion.

We must further accept that we don’t have infinite choices. We have very limited choices. Most options we can conceive of are impossible. We cannot think of being in Paris, and be in Paris. We cannot think of being in the year known now as 1850, then be there. But we also cannot invent a water-to-wine machine simply because we can conceive of it. We cannot be in New York at noon and Dehli an hour later. We cannot write twenty books in a year. The limits themselves are finite, but a massively long list.

None of this is counter-intuitive. It’s counter cultural.

It’s time the people control the time.

We, the people, own time.

Our infrastructure must be fully consistent with that absolute truth.

Housing and time emerged together. As the context of our daily lives became more and more safe from daily threats and distracting insufficiencies, we had the freedom to deeply synchronize and coordinate our time and labors with other humans.

But we have a full philosophical barbell arch here, where we can return to responding to our context. This extraordinary liberty will be the soil from which our higher forms emerge.

Owning the means of production may not be as important as it was once regaled to be; owning time itself can be what sets us free.

Time is love.

In a future world, where suffering and strife are solved due to rapid mimicry of essential behaviors in high resolution, enabled by the clockchain + DTI, how we spend our time is how we spend - and cultivate - our love.

In the end, the love expressed when you align your intentions and your impact, is the love you take.

//////

Thank you.

Sean

//////

(1) Is the universe immortal? Let’s figure out! But until then, we’ll go with ‘not for storage costs’.

(2) A highly-sophisticated highly-coordinated PoHT attack where the conscious being does not agree with their chained identity — would be a great sci-fi script. It should also be theoretically impossible because fraud can only span so many nodes deep in the DTI past the scale of roughly 10B entries. That admittedly arbitrary point represents a threshold at which so many real things exist that a whole artificial history would have to be contrived, and so long as each clockchain entry records its own time of recording.

Addenda

These updates are made after the first draft circulated editors, colleagues, friends, and family. Thank you all for your help and feedback. Thank you to my family for your love and support.

Encryption

Nothing stated herein should stop the user from posting encrypted data; although it would probably break DTI label look up and taxonomy functions, in at least some of the cases. The ideal encryption system would have multiple zones: user management, clockchain meta management, encrypted clockchain graphs, and encrypted variables within graphs. There should be another set of encryption tools, which include the ability to decrypt-on-time-trigger and perhaps smart decryption contracts, the former being of more prescience and portent -- and inter-referential to the clockchain.

Optional mutability.

A critical point of feedback is that there are many reasons to include a mutability function - whether ticker or trigger - that ages entries out of the clockchain. It’s not clear how that would work, or how archived versions could possibly be handled. But, it’s a good subject for debate. Perhaps there is some asymptotic curve value over time like ADPRS; there is a trigger; there is user command; or some other function that stops including an entry. I’m skeptical, but optimistic.

Among the good reasons to have optional mutability: people may do things they regret and want to hide; fraudulent entries have to be stopped somehow; no clear mechanism exists to stop group-level deception, creating a statistically-likely yet entirely false entry; and the storage costs of all entries, over time, becomes very large. Perhaps the mindset of optional mutability is wrong altogether, and all entries should de factor age out, but can be set to perpetuity. Perhaps these entries have higher or residual mining fees?

Role of miners: Proof of Orbital Position in Space.

My brilliant friend and past collaborator Alex offered up the brainstorm that clockchain miners monitor our position in space to record time. By analyzing data from a variety of prospective sources - satellite data, eclipses, orbital data, local basic telescope data, and dozens more - the miners could develop a consensus on where in space they are. This would exactly position us in time, as well. Appending POPS to clockchain entries would show exactly where in the universe the entrant was when the entry was entered, which would show exactly when. This is a superior time format to what is described in my essay, and in the official first version of this essay, I will replace my ideas with this one. Combined with nuclear time, it is a system the whole universe should be able to agree upon.

Governance term limits, and power time-outs.

Another brilliant friend, Rakshak, pointed out that “term limits” on the governance of the clockchain are important. To be clear: I’m working to build the clockchain in a decentralized way that does not put me in a long-term exclusive position of power, but rather ages me out of the power structure entirely, becoming a self-sustaining emergent phenomena with rewards to all contribute to its success, not just a founding handful.

It’s not clear how to do that, but it should be recursive, in my opinion. Perhaps it is a count of the number of graphs posted to the clockchain. I can be on the tDAO with voting power for the first billion? Then the second billion I start quadratic scaling down in power, but never reaching zero on my returns. Whatever the mechanism should be, the design should enable incentives that last perpetually (i.e. revenue share that goes asymptotically towards zero but never reaches it), but also prevent governance power from suffering nepotism, unbreakable dominance, x% attacks, and other crippling problems faced by the battleground of failed crypto initiatives.

Only a fraction of time spent will be logged in the clockchain.

As a clarification, I can’t imagine that people benefit put “brushing my teeth” on the clockchain, with maybe some very outlier cases like research at a dental college. It’s not a calendar or behavioral quantification tool, any more than bitcoin is a mortgage broker.

Act 1: In the future, your calendar will care about you.

We’re building Sundial because our calendars are functional but abusive vestiges of another time, with absurd assumptions . Coordination is critical — sometimes. But how much of our lives really, truly need to be coordinated to the second, in an era where computers solve more and more of our problems? Less and less.

Rather than prove it in a lengthy post, I’ll give you, the reader, the benefit of the doubt on forecasting the long-term impact of work from home, automation, AI, and rise of cultural values focused on spending time on self-care and selfie experiences. Each of these erode our need to synchronize and coordinate.

Here’s how we’re building a “calendar” alternative for that new world:

Build a calendar that is honest about the scarcity of your time.

You have a very short time to live, on a cosmic scale. You may be able to extend your life soon, but human bodies are not going to live for millions of years anytime in the foreseeable future, so many experiences operate in an extremely limited time bracket. Your chance to play professional sports is limited to an age range; your chance to have kids is limited to an age range; your chance to see an eclipse is time-limited. Almost everything has some upper and lower bound of time that can be spent.(1) Those hard ranges are the first principles upon which Sundial is built, including how long you can live. The sundial is a metaphor enabled by sunrise and sunset — hard limits on our days, forced by the rotation of the cosmos themselves.

There is a hard limit on how many backyard barbecues you can go to.

There is a hard limit on the number of yoga classes you can attend.

There is a hard limit on the number of sunsets you can see.

When you model all of your time, every action has an opportunity cost. Watching a show while you eat dinner? You missed one of the limited set of sunsets you can watch during your time as conscious human life.

The thing is, we don’t live in a world in which we are deluding ourselves, not nearly as much as we used to. The awareness that life is short is broad; tightening the grip on the wallet of your time hasn’t started yet; but it’s coming.

Build a calendar that keeps a score.

The Sundial alpha web app already includes the ability to approximate how an activity will impact your longevity. By using a Deep Time model, Sundial can keep various scores about all kinds of stuff. This is going to be the core of how we enable scorekeeping and forecasting. Your Deep Digital Twin can be many different versions of you, and we attach consequences to those future projected data models. So we can forecast how your exercise, for instance, will impact your longevity.

Is it a realistic forecast? It’s mathematically impossible to say.

Are forecasts valuable because they’re accurate, or because they help you make decisions today with better information? If you check the weather, it’s the latter. Weather forecasts are notoriously difficult. Forecasts enable space exploration by analyzing weather patterns seconds ahead of the present because of the real time it takes to turn giant rudders being longer than the time needed to correct to strong turbulence. Economic forecasts are the foundation of our public policy — perhaps all public policy.

Why do all this?

Sundial and our approach to social impact.

I have spent about half of my career in companies that are b-corp, “social impact,” or some other generally-trying-to-do-good model of business. I’ve spent the other half in high-growth venture equity companies and consulting for private equity funds and mega conglomerates. I’m not convinced that Tom’s Shoes is a morally better company than Intel; as a matter of fact, I think the world would collapse without Intel, and be fine without Tom’s. My perspective now is that we should all be the judge of our own outcomes, but also that we should strive to make those choices as the healthiest version of ourselves.

So, I have never pushed an outcome in testing EDITOR with people. It’s a 1-2 hour process, and involves dozens - even hundreds - of questions. People laugh, people cry. They talk about their lives. Here are the things I’ve learned help people, observationally:

1. Breaking bad habits through increased awareness. Realizing that you will spend 22% of your waking life watching shows can be a reality check. Sometimes perspectives change quickly - in minutes or seconds - on visualizing something like this.

2. Social permission to act against loneliness and disconnection. People have disconnected from each other during COVID, especially from older people, and there is now a real need to reach out and plan activities. Sundial at its best gives people the reason, the envelope, and the actual invitation to get together. It’s easier to invite someone to a museum than to have a chat, for many people.

3. “I have no time.” means you have bad habits. Many of these people have plenty of time, but are loaded down with either responsibilities they don’t want, or habits that don’t fulfill them.

4. Their intention did not meet their impact. They intend to have lots of magic moments with their kids; instead they are spending their time shopping real estate to find the place to have future magic moments.

5. Hyper scheduling. Some people find happiness in knowing all the things they want to do. While we have to be careful about rewarding dopamine by planning instead of doing, for a lot of people a life plan is a reward unto itself.

6. Looking in the magic mirror. Like a lot of exercises, Sundial helps people stop lying to themselves about the things they know they’re lying to themselves about.

7. Emotional state modeling helps people want to stop being upset so much of the time. Future essays will be dedicated to this.

8. HD mimicry — as mentioned at length before, people want to mimic top performers. Freeing up “me” time to mimic “hero” time is appealing to a lot of folks.

9. Whoa factor. Ever seen how your life will be going in 2030, and meditated on it for 20 minutes? (Emoji)

10. The power of positive visualization. Sundial as a brand, as a metaphor, and as a practice is atavistic. We use contemporary tools to map reality as it is laid out before us. At its core, Sundial is yet another exercise in the power of positive visualization; a tool designed for a universe that responds to the stories we tell it.

Do we need a b-corp to do this? I’m not sure. My wife co-authored the b-corp legislation in Arizona, and she’s not, either. Are DAO’s the new b-corp? Not sure about that either. For now, Sundial is an S-corp.

Sundial is “The calendar that cares about you.” ™

To care about you, your calendar has to know you. Not in some way that’s focused on selling you ads. The real you. Your hopes, your dreams, your reactions to outcomes.

A computer can only care about what you tell it to care about. Typically, we tell our calendars when we need to coordinate with other people, and we use generic labels, not a structured taxonomy of activities that can be quantified and modeled. Sundial changes all of that, creating a platform where you explore the person you want to be, then act on specific goals, based on specific outcomes. It’s like converting life from a TV show you watch to a video game you play.

The more information you put into Sundial about who you want to be, the better it can help you actually live that life. Whether it’s eating dinner with grandma more or getting a black belt - or any type of life goal - Sundial is focused on outcomes, and those are determined by you.

Sundial wants you to live longer.

Sundial wants you to be less lonely and more connected.

Sundial wants you to be mentally and physically healthy.

Sundial wants you to be economically successful.

Sundial wants you to be as good at your job as the best person in the world is at that job.

Sundial wants you to be the best you.

We are all experiments in consciousness.

Sundial doesn’t have a bias towards any philosophy, creed, partisan position, or any limitations (other than legal) on what makes the best version of you. That’s completely up to you. As the founder of the company, this is a direct application of my personal beliefs. We are all beautiful manifestations of consciousness from the stardust, and we should be the best us — not the best whomever someone else tells us to be.

Feedback loops and digital twins.

The largest activity forecast we have done yet, internally, modeled about 1.3mm activities in the client’s future. That was because the client was relatively young, and interested in living a long life already, exercising and maintaining a rigorous medical routine. They had a lot of time to live. That’s a lot of brushing your teeth.

Most calendars don’t have feedback loops, and most that do are enterprise sales products. While it’s not in our web app yet, we’re transparent about heading that way.

If you’re interested, here’s how much I’ll brush my teeth.

(Sundial app link.)

Sundial is like Fount — for time.

I’m inspired by the story of Fount. They’ve taken two huge startup categories and synthesized them into a more thoughtful model. The idea is your blood testing and health control what you get in your meal kits they deliver. It’s genius, imo. Packy McCormick thinks so, too.

The way Sundial is like Fount for time is that Sundial focuses on how your actions impact your life, your wellbeing, your happiness, your sense of finding and fulfilling a life’s purpose. Sundial doesn’t beep when it’s time for a meeting. Sundial aligns your values with your actions.

Act 2: A calendar for a time of great transformation.

We have to adapt faster and faster.

Economists and analysts print volumes each day on how the rate of innovation, the rate of change, is increasing. Meme behaviors can sweep across the globe in hours now, even minutes in some cases. The Thing of The Day is a trend that is going to increase, and every day will have a thing.

Our economies are going to re-distribute. A Network State will emerge on top of nation states. Whether we go multi-polar or things just get weird, it will be different.

Americans will need to learn advanced manufacturing quickly. Other nations will struggle with the requirements of retooling their economies. AI and automation will flip more scripts than computers and the internet have so far.

Sundial isn’t just about bucket lists. It’s about living best lives, and that includes being awesome, reliable, and smart about your work and productivity. We are all interdependent and need each other’s best-ness.

Mimic how time is invested, and with whom, and in what sequence.

This is the core of the small networks of operator + service provider + clients that are formed by some of the fastest growing companies in history. Humans seem to have evolved into team structures. We need to focus self-performance not just on the self, but on mimicry we exhibit in personal, interpersonal, and sequential patterns.

Are all actions connected to time?

Yes.

Sundial is a platform for a new way of life.

Enough consumption. Don’t live a little. Live a lot.

As the world changes, we need to spend more time doing things that move our time from passive to active. So many people have a list of accomplishments, after which they can “relax” and this is when they consume things. That is OK, and we - in part - will promote a lot of that. But not exclusively that.

Sundial is building a tool to enable humans to refine and replicate our life journeys, broken down into activities and playbooks.

Be the customer, not the product or the audience.

Your life is being sliced into milliseconds and sold to the highest bidder, already. Advertising model platforms are all connected to this harsh reality — your time is for sale. One party attracts it, usually with compelling content, then once it is captured, sells that time and space to someone else. You get the emotions of the content, and perhaps an escape, but not a penny of the transaction. Many times, the advertising platform itself is benefiting not just from your specific time, but from your future projected time, as well. That is what the stock market for publicly traded advertising based models is — a forecast of your time.

Ruin bad habits with perspective.

One of the most powerful use cases of Sundial is helping people snap out of a bad behavior. We are going to tell the stories of real people who have really changed their behavior thanks to Sundial.

I sat down with a friend of mine last October. During COVID he went through a divorce, went through a fall off in his career in the entertainment and commercial production industry, and moved in and out of his parents’ house while finalizing a house sale. A rough time. He didn’t start drinking heavily or gain a bunch of weight; but he started watching a lot of content.

When we added it all up, and visualized it as a Sundial - how much of his life he would spend on this - it was 12:45pm in the day of his life, and he was going to watch shows until 5:20pm. He said he stopped binge watching that day. I checked in with him at three months out, and he was dating again, as well as traveling to Mexico for fun. He was living his life. Of course the change was within him, and his therapy process played a part, and so on — but he credited his three hour EDITOR experience with Sundial as “life changing.” He’s a real friend, this means a lot to me. It was a big reason I doubled down, shifting to spending most of my time spent on Sundial - unpaid - designing, developing, and market testing.

It’s time to help people out. Be a friend. Be a mentor.

We’re likely to see wild changes in our economic structure, and our leaders are publicly warning the whole world about global food shortages. People need help; and people will need lots of help. Whether it’s your neighbor, or the world away — you can help people. Sundial makes it super easy to see how much of your time it actually takes to, for example, help in a community garden for two years. I modeled out my own time, and it’s surprisingly small.

(Link to Sean garden sundial)

Anti-calendarism and our competitive advantage.

Something trying to be the best in a product class can’t compete with something that undermines the existence of its product class. A horse can’t compete with a car. A computer is inconceivable orders of magnitude more powerful than an abacus wizard ever could be, and knows of the existence neither of the wizard nor his abacus.

The most powerful and largest companies in tech can easily add most features. But they cannot easily add features that undermine the purpose of their products. Search companies with calendars can’t take the time of day off the calendar, without extraordinary education to the market, and careful public relations over a long period of time. Companies building tools for work are so deeply vested in time as it synchronizes global supply chains, that any change the structure of time management is a loss of market position for them, and not something they could rationally pursue. In all but a few cases, time needs to stay the same for the system to work.

Anti-calendarism, deep work, and deep time.

Deep Work is a concept that has spread like wildfire, and is proudly circulated among great thinkers, leading engineers, and prominent voices in podcasting as the way to get shit done. Dozens - if not hundreds - of apps promise ways to manage this. Schedules, readings, trainings, timer apps, and a never-ending set of top 5 lists in email newsletters, each promising to make the most out of your day.

In this way, our Ancient Roman predecessors would have likely understood their point, and named it simply Carpe Diem, which was often inscribed on their sundials.

COVID cost us billions of hours of quarantine, collectively.

I ran some numbers about COVID, and they’re shocking. The amount of time we have spent in quarantine - as a country, and as a species - is staggering. I don’t need Sundial’s math to run the numbers, here they are:

Billions of people * minimum dozens of days locked down * 12 hour minimum day = tens of billions of hours locked down. Probably hundreds of billions. Maybe a trillion including the current and near-future.

Factory schedules need to depart with factories.

Stupid management practices by small-minded people who don’t care about pain and trauma and sensitivity have crushed the souls of the brilliant with schedules designed to make peasants of our minds.

Your schedule — as art. “Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.”

Great songs, great movies, and great thinkers have all cited this expression. A permutation of carpe diem, purportedly engraved on sundials in Ancient Rome as well, this expression encapsulates half of what Sundial is about. That is the need we hope to foster in most people, to love the opportunity at consciousness, to explore, to revel, to feel, and to love.

(The other half is about being excellent at whatever you do, fwiw.)

As we plan our bucket lists, so we plan our lives.

EDITOR is called EDITOR because it literally edits your life story. You are the author. We’re just here to help.

Do great things — together. Your calendar is your social life. Two player mode coming soon.

“I am an ark in the swift flood of time, and my companions, a fellowship. Who throws in with us sails into light.” - Rumi

Whether it’s helping a community garden, or inventing the next medical breakthrough tech with a badass team, you can probably do more faster with a great plan. Maybe you need one year, three year, or a five year plan.

Sundial is evolving into a social calendar platform. A lot of social media pushes you to be the person advertisers want you to be. When we enable two-player mode, it becomes a central point for sharing life’s journeys together. Because Sundial isn’t focused on social streams or constant engagement, but instead scoring as high as you can in the game of life, it pushes you to be the person you want to be.

High performers want to mimic.

“That great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.” - Tennyson

This quotation has been attributed to many, including Picasso. I first heard it as “Good artists borrow; great artists steal.” which appears to be Steve Jobs imitating and improving it from Tennyson.

Later in this essay, you can see how Sundial EDITOR already has a draft function to compare yourself to famous high performers, like comparing how much you read to how much Oprah reads, per her famous hour a day dictum for her book club.

Time pattern mimicry is a relatively new thing.

While there are countless blog posts about how “Elon spends his day” it’s unlikely any given day follows that pattern so specifically. It’s hard to imagine Elon skipping a meeting going over an algorithm to ensure he has his 20 minutes of cardio at exactly 4pm. So, people are being - basically - inspired by his hypothetical schedule, and making probably minor changes to their own when reading these pieces. It could be Steve Jobs or Joan of Arc and it wouldn’t matter — people are replicating a false schedule. A real one would be complex, include campaigns, as well as different schedules for different phases of company growth.

What we’re building at Sundial is a way to spend the same time budget as Elon, which is fundamentally different. Distribute a complex narrative across a set amount of scarce time, and then you can really emulate someone.

The same would be true of a great cellist. If you follow their time budget, it’s likely you’ll be very good at cello in the end. Perhaps you don’t attend the Royal Academy to study cello, but use an online tutor. In any case, if you dedicate yourself and mimic the time budget spent, you are likely to onboard a very similar neurological graph structure that allows you to mostly play what they can play.

High resolution mimicry is going to rapidly replace “read a book and think about it” self-help and business mastery courses. At first the rate of change will be slow, but it will then become exponential, and HD mimicry will quickly become the only credible type of self-improvement.

Don’t have time? Buy time.™

Sundial is going to enable a new feature soon — the ability to Buy time.™

We know that for people to spend time on what they need to do, they need to be able to have more time. We’re working to build an incredible team of partners who can bring this vision about.

Want to live longer? It’s a lot about how you spend your time.

The diseases most likely to kill us in the United States are basically self-imposed. That doesn’t mean we would survive forever if we didn’t eat sugar, or inhale air pollution. It just means that we can increase our odds of living longer based on our behaviors today. Arguably, there has never been a time that a threshold of great longevity may so clearly emerge, as advances in life sciences and brain-to-computer interfaces are increasing in their pace of realization. Perhaps there is a magic day, say 2039, after which people live to 300 years on average. I would like to get to that day.

Sundial does more than help you go to the gym, or understand the importance of that. It projects how your life will go because you go to the gym. You will see a whole new world enabled by exercising into your later years. Your list of options stays long. If you lose the ability to hike, for example, perhaps half of all Bucket List items in Sundial are immediately unavailable.

Your doctors, your healers, your thought leaders, and your spiritual leaders all have opinions on how to program your Sundial.

The “self-improvement industry” is a $10B+ market and growing. Some podcasters have built empires around time mimicry. Some in just…four hours…of work each week.

Beyond the billions of hours listened by podcast audiences around the world, physicians, spiritual leaders, and most employers, as well as most schools, have very specific prescriptions for your time budget.

An apple a day is about seven minutes a day. Twenty minutes of exercise a day is a use of time, even though it’s tied to optimal cardiovascular exercise ranges. Meditating every morning is a time prescription as much as a behavior prescription — if you ask a practiced meditator if they are really spending twenty minutes in the headspace, or rather allocating twenty minutes, flailing like a mental fish out of water for a bunch of it, and then grasping at a fleeting few minute of clarity transcending their monkey brain, it’s likely to be the latter. It’s a time, not a thought.

Most religious practices have time allocations. Pray five time a day. Come to church on Sunday; temple on Saturday; youth group on Wednesday; this holiday; that holiday. Again, most practices don’t expect people to be automatically spiritually reverent during these times, but to keep the drumbeat of time allocation in their lives. In many Protestant American traditions, there is an expression of committing “time, talent, and treasure” — it’s a powerful leveling factor for some people to pay the organization’s cash bills, while others pay the time bills, often being services to those in need.

Across these domains, actions can be broken into activities and time budgets to mimic, and for the most part - barring sometimes having access to places or equipment - you can manage mental, physical, and spiritual health.

Building a calendar that matches the values of people I respect.

Due to commercial use laws, I can’t list the people I respect so much, quoting from their tweets. But it’s easy to find a media personality, celebrity, or visionary who says time matters more than money. From people who invented personal computers to people who star on the most popular streaming shows, celebrities and leaders the world over credit their inner knowledge of the scarcity of time for some of the mindset that makes them who they are. Please check my Twitter for a mega thread of examples of personal favorites.

Act 3: EDITOR is a lifelong process of self-discovery and self-improvement. The Sundial App takes one minute, or so.

Think of EDITOR like Sundial Pro.

EDITOR is software to edit your life story. It runs forecasts on hundreds of thousands of future activities in your life, and in some cases, many potential versions of you. It takes hours - sometimes days - to program in detail. It’s done with the help of a professional, who coaches you through the grueling process of modeling your best and worst selves, then modifying your functional calendar until your behaviors align with your schedule. In this essay, I’m going to lay out the way it works from my personal EDITOR work.

A critical thing to know is that these slides come from multiple people, to protect each’s anonymity. I’m one of many, and their names have been changed / removed. Everything is shared with those clients’ consent, and as anonymized.

Before we get into the walkthrough:

Storytellers and time.

The manipulation of time is an ancient technique for storytelling and visualizing things that are not happening in present time. This ability itself may be very rare, if not unique to humans and computers humans program, for now. One of the oldest examples of time manipulation is in Arbahamic texts, which depict Isaiah moving the sundial of Ahaz ten degrees backward. Mark Twain put a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Tarantino cut Pulp Fiction with a time traveler’s lens. Today, more than one VR app offers “time travel” as a button to another time, through photographs, augmented reality, and other nifty tricks like historical audio converted to immersive audio. Spike Lee put out See You Yesterday, quite literally about time travel. Ryan Reynolds just debuted The Adam Project, where he meets his past and future self.

I believe the stories we tell ourselves shape our realities. That’s why I’m building what I’m building — so you can tell yourself a story that shapes the reality in which you want to live. You are the writer. Sundial and EDITOR are better typewriters, models that can forecast the consequences of what you write to them.

The best stories take time.

You can’t write your life story in a day. You can live your life story — in exactly one life.

Using a tool like EDITOR is a commitment to optimizing the way you use your time. Starting today, EDITOR is becoming a subscription. We’ll onboard you to a new life story, then work monthly to review your progress on your path. If you’d like to reserve one of the new client slots we’re adding each week, please sign up here.

https://sundialcalendar.com/edit-your-life-story-with-editor

Talking to a human to get conversational feedback loops and casual honesty with yourself.

There is something about reviewing your schedule with a Time Coach, seeing how different versions of you could play out based on your behavior, and then adjusting your real world calendar to be who you want to be. It’s got an aspect of a traditional or spiritual practice, in terms of self reflection, and planning for the future. It’s got an aspect of talking to a financial analyst, although no financial information or advice is exchanged — to be clear. Our goal is to build models of you that inform you. It’s a difficult process, but well worth it.

Once the Deep Digital Twin of you is built - think of it like a full body MRI for your calendar - we start to get immediate feedback. Do you like who you would be if you lived one way, more than this other way? Would you rather write multiple books, or just one or two, and master another hobby, like painting, as well? You can choose either path, or neither.

As you fine-tune your EDITOR model, your Deep Digital Twin will become more and more accurate, both to your behaviors and your life goals. Once you have a model you like, we export it to the Sundial App, and to mainstream calendar apps.

BUT then you go live life.

Because this is about how you live, not how you’d like to live, EDITOR is an ongoing process. You’ll get a lot of information up front, but a choose-your-own-pace cycle of check-ins with your Time Coach will make it possible to update your models. This is a premium service for people making the most of their time. The feedback loop is critical to fine-tuning your model, especially for emotional outcomes.

EDITOR puts your Deep Digital Twin in a Deep Time environment and it’s wild to see the results.

Is this too buzzword heavy? Yeah. But is it even more than that awesome? Yes.

A digital twin on top of a whole-life timeline enables you to see how different behavior models - different versions of yourself - play out. Let’s dive in:

Perspective: We start with the meta view. Sundial is forecasting 454,663 events for ‘Sean Zero’ - one of my twins, using myself where there is a name attached.

The time of the day of your life.

Sundial is predicated on a metaphor of “the day of your life.” It’s a way to look at how you spend your time allocation. For me, it’s getting close to noon in my twin’s model of his life, were it just one day. That’s a wake up call for real me!

Learning to think in “Sundial Time” to understand time scarcity.

It takes a little practice to learn to think like this: “If my life were just one day long, how much time would I spend on this activity?”

In this case, the client wanted to spend more time casually making art. She realized she would only spend 27 seconds of the day of her life doing that. This page of her initial report immediately re-framed her mental model about creating.

At this rate, she was spending so much time focused on work and kids, that she hadn’t been checking in with old friends. Had she continued to behave as she had been the past few years, art and old friends would make up a combined minute of the day of her life. Again - quick change in perspective, slow change in behavior.

It wasn’t all bad habits. Yoga dominated. This still was less than she wants.

Looking at a life journey — in this case business.

Imagine a person who intends to spend 15 years running a venture-backed startup. That’s about 3 hours and 21 minutes of the day of that person’s life. During that time, other projects will require emails to professional services providers, attorneys, realtors, et. al that aren’t part of regular work. That person, if they manage to get their company acquired, will likely become a board member, and then investor in other companies to empower other entrepreneurs to build better worlds like they did. They’ll also have to handle bad debts, commute, and handle their small businesses, like AirBNB’s. All of that together — a forecast of 42,442 hours of their life in work.

Seeing old friends gets more and more rare. Every 3 years sound right?

This client has a plan - and cheat cards - to increase their longevity, value creation, and accomplishment of rare life goals by regularly connecting with old friends. The client was a young woman but thought this image was great for representing chatting with her girlfriends.

Keeping score, forecasting score.

Sundial fundamentally changes what a calendar is by focusing on outcomes based on your behaviors, and actions based on your intentions and plans, not passive mindset.

A powerful consequence of a calendar keeping score is that it enables outcomes forecasting like longevity. In this case, we ran an investor’s time across investment classes, modeling out their own perception of what created the most value. It was a wake up call to see real estate vs. venture when real estate takes much less time and stress.

Longevity is another critical dimension to analyze. It turns out brushing your teeth is a huge “bang for your buck” in time spent to the time it extends your life, as oral hygiene has a lot to do with cardiovascular health.

What are your time investments by relationship class?

Using powerful financial modeling concepts that are relatively simple to implement with our data structure, we can see that this person has a life plan to spend the majority of their time working. That’s true for almost all of us.

In the same domain of analysis, we can look at types of behaviors. Work and Entertainment usually make up people’s biggest time investments. Holidays, bucket lists, etc. are very small pie slices — typically.

How do you feel about how you spend your time?

It seems a relatively simple question to ask how what you do makes you feel, but people are often - usually - surprised at how much of their time is going to things they don’t enjoy. The classic example is a job they dislike, or an unhappy long-term relationship. But often people just don’t like emailing, they also don’t like binge watching but do it anyway, then feel bad. EDITOR assigns emotions to each event in your forecasts and can break down how you are going to spend your life feeling.

For everyone who has done it so far, feeling Exceptional or meeting Life Goals are smaller parts of the day of their life than “Good” or “Negative.”

It makes me personally question how I live my life, I am working with people through this.

The many you’s you can be.

EDITOR compares three possible versions of you:

1. What Sundial forecasts you will do.

2. What you said you want to do.

3. What you would do if you behaved the same as you have historically.

For clients, it’s effective to compare the many timelines they might live, and have to reconcile with the rationality (brutality?) of EDITOR’s forecast, which takes into account hundreds of thousands of passive events, like eating, brushing your teeth, and traffic.

In this case, you can see my wife, Courtney, wants us to spend a lot more time playing sports together as a family. We would spend just 122 hours doing this with our kids while they are kids if we behaved the same way for the rest of the time we have. She aspires that we spend about 10x that time. Our forecast is that she would do it about half that, in this case, due to a variety of factors, including her other athletic commitments, yoga, etc.

Is this forecast correct? As much as the weather, perhaps. Has it changed our behavior? I challenge you to a game of fútbol in our new backyard soccer net.

EDITOR has a time machine, too.

Everything we do at Sundial involves the ability to gain perspective by taking alternative views of time, time management, and really, database design and time. For EDITOR clients, the time machine function is more about individual goals. In this case, you can see an alternative model where my wife is too busy, and doesn’t hit her goals. The pairing of possibility with the reality that nothing comes true unless you do it works very well in giving perspective.

Editing your life story is important, complex, and takes a time investment.

“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” - R. Buckminster Fuller.

Imagine that someone gives you hundreds of thousands of dollars. Would you spend any of that money ensuring there was a sound budget for it? I would. The same is true for my hundreds of thousands of hours. I am willing to spend a meaningful percentage of my Budget of Conscious Hours to spend that time well.

//////

Thank you.

Sean //////

(1) There are outliers to everything.

Act 1: Time is Scarce

For the shamans of ancient México, time was something like a thought; a thought thought by something unrealizable in its magnitude.

Carlos Castaneda, The Wheel of Time

44 Million Minutes and The Long History of Whole Life Time Models

Just as Jonathon Larson counted when he wrote the lyrics for RENT, we can all count how many minutes our life might be. If it’s 525,600 minutes per year, and if we live about 84 years, then it’s about 44,000,000 minutes we have in life. Sundial maps in milliseconds, so in the software, your life might be about 3.14e12ms.

https://sundialcalendar.com/blog/life-is-like-a-sundial-314e12-milliseconds

For us to live with time as we have it today first required consciousness emerging from the stardust; then the invention of sexagesimal (60-base) counting systems, technologies from sundials to atomic clocks, and the mass acceptance across billions of people of this model of time. Trillions upon trillions of perceived milliseconds. All rendered, not found in physics, where time is the progression of Planck lengths, but by human perception, itself derived from what Fuller might describe as a temporary integrity of electricity in brain goo, then participating in coordinated consensus through social communication, and generations of artifacts and tools to keep time — all that for us to glance at a clock and say oh crap I’m late.

There is a book making the rounds that addresses time scarcity in the format of weeks. It has some poetic writing — I particularly like this line:

The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

In this case, he breaks down the roughly 76 year life span average for his audience to a simple model: 4,000 weeks. The use of the “4,000 weeks” framing is the literalism of Windows to Sundial’s Apple style metaphor: if your life were just one day, as you watched it pass in a Sundial, how would you want to spend it?

Sundial EDITOR maps your entire life, then offers a visualization where you see your whole life as just one day. Our brains struggle to derive emotion from big numbers in many cases, and making it scarce as a day makes it real. Watching three hours a day of content? If life were just one day, would you spend three hours on shows? 

 Deep time modeling is not new. Ancient religious texts reference people living 900-1000 “years” — which seems very likely to be months, or, more accurately, lunar cycles. We all get about 1,000 lunar cycles of life. Whether you focus on productivity and time management for 4,000 weeks, or sacred journeys for 1,000 lunar cycles, it’s all scratching at what - perhaps - makes us sapiens sapiens. Those who know that they will die, and who strive to know what they are. A lot of psychology, religion, tech, investments and in many ways architecture are about escaping death, escaping this scarcity. But in the age of software, I propose we need to lean in, embrace that we we know we will pass. Life our lives as though they were just one day.

The theory I live by, and the theory from which Sundial emerges is this: the more we courageously cultivate an awareness of the scarcity of our time, the more we will live the lives we want to live. The correlation is linear.

Deep Time Through the Lens of Planning for Stargazing with Grandpa

I have two little kids, and one of our family traditions, when we visit Southern Appalachia and its dark skies, is to setup the big telescope my dad bought when I was a kid. It’s still in good shape and on a clear winter night, the views are magnificent. Sitting there this past winter solstice with my kids, wife, and parents, I couldn’t help but think of the scale of time — photons that left their home star billions of my years ago zapping my eyeballs. Human lifespans, being about 44 million minutes, are many orders of magnitude shorter than each photon’s journey.

Our time with my dad is scarce. Same with my mom. All our kids’ boomer relatives. Of course -- c’est la vie. Our time with our kids as kids and my dad is even more scarce. Our oldest will age out of kid mode within a decade. My own time with my kids is scarce. It’s this kind of grateful recognition of the scarcity of time that led me to, in August 2019, build a spreadsheet that mapped out how many times we would do “bucket list” items with our kids. The numbers were shocking.

For instance — stargazing on the winter solstice with a kid under the age of 18, with good weather, with good health, while visiting Appalachia, with a working telescope…the first principles hard limit on that happening is 12 years max, minus some weather deductions, maybe 25% of the time. So 9 times. But kids are sick once, dad is sick once. So 7 times. We go visit the other side of the family twice, and the telescope breaks once because kids. That leaves us 4 times. We have to make each time count.

The spreadsheet drew incredulity from my wife — at first. She couldn’t believe what was implied by first principles analysis of how scarce our time with the kids would be. But my models were built on techniques I knew from my career in data science based startups, and I tripled checked the math. We will be lucky to push to 6 solstices with my dad while my daughter is still a “kid” — and late teenage years are pushing that definition. It might be more like she doesn’t like doing stargazing any more post adolescence, and we’re down to 2 or 3 instances. The lesson is clear, then: Make each time count.

https://app.sundialcalendar.com/share?meta=eyJubSI6IlNlYW4gTWNEb25hbGQiLCJhdCI6Mjg2LCJhaSI6MCwidHUiOjMsImFnIjo0MCwibGUiOjEwNCwibnQiOjIsIm55IjoyMCwiaHMiOjEuNSwic3QiOjYuNX0

An Homage: The Tim Urban / Ferriss Time Option

Long before this first spreadsheet, a new vision of time modeling came out from Tim Urban about how much time you spend with your parents as an adult. The Tail End shows a clear mathematical model that most of your time with your parents is when you are a kid. Tim Ferriss helped make this thesis even more famous by crediting it for improving his relationship and travel plans with his parents.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html

As an homage to Tim, one of the default options on the new Sundial Web App is to model how many vacations you’ll take with your parents.

https://app.sundialcalendar.com/share?meta=eyJubSI6IlNlYW4gTWNEb25hbGQiLCJhdCI6Mjg3LCJhaSI6MCwidHUiOjMsImFnIjo0MCwibGUiOjEwNCwibnQiOjIsIm55IjoyMCwiaHMiOjU3LCJzdCI6Ni41fQ

Mapping all time. Starting with 0.0001%.

What is possible with contemporary technology that would have been difficult in any prior generation - or at least very expensive - is to model out every millisecond of a person’s life. At Sundial, we are calling this a Deep Time model, to position as part of the “deep tech” movement. While “deep time” in physics also refers to mapping out all of the known universe of time - which would of course, for Sundial’s purposes, take more computation power than is on earth and include a lot of silly guess work regarding the laws of physics literally everywhere. As practical applicators of Deep Time, we are taking a slice of it. It’s hard to know how much but I’ll run the numbers someday soon. Let’s call it 0.0000001% - “six zeros” - of all time. That slice is the slice most important to any human: their own life. Mapped to the millisecond.

Act 2: The Best Time to Change How Time Works was Yesterday, The Next Best Time is Today

Norbert Werner issued a warning about the potential of automation: ‘We can be humble and live a good life with the aid of machines,” he wrote, “or we can be arrogant and die.” It is still a fair warning.

John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace

Now’s the time to build the time company.

Can I prove it to you?

Post COVID, It’s Time We Get Our Time Back

Wasting time watching content is still wasting time. Wasting time on social media is still wasting time. Wasting time on sugar addiction is still wasting time. Loneliness is a waste of time. Stress reduces your time budget. Depression decreases your capacity to make the most of time.

Yet problematic content watching, detrimental social media behavior, self-abusive eating, stress, and depression are all going up during and after COVID. Within weeks of COVID starting, we knew loneliness had skyrocketed.

We have traded billions of hours of life experiences for billions of hours of scrolling, watching, eating, drinking, and being bummed.

It’s time we get our time back.

There’s No Normal To Go Back To

Sundial is building for a new future, one inconceivable just a decade ago, fueled by resignations, the work from home model which is likely to oscillate back and forth in response to crises and climate, and perhaps most important — the rise in automation, AI and the coming changes in need for fulfilling employment. All these trends lead to an important inflection point: people will either get more freedom and free time because they want it, or some people will surely feel that they have been robbed of meaning, value, and identity as their work time fades into the sunset.

People are changing the definition, the schedule, and the way they work. Crypto has given rise to a class of quasi-investors who have some financial freedom, scrutiny over how financial products work, and know how to use collective actions made possible through DAO’s and other blockchain and AI-driven tools — all very quickly and at broad scale. All this changes what a schedule is, and that changes what a calendar needs to be for people.

Seems unlikely an incumbent will make the switch.

People Care More About Life Now — Quantity and Quality

Rampant investment amounts are going into life extension, and wild ideas like uploading consciousness out of the meatverse and into the metaverse. In the hundred or so years since it’s become scientifically hypothesized and confirmed that consciousness emerged from the stardust and evolved slowly across the planet, we’ve gone from realizing we are made of stardust to broadly seeking and paying for transcendence.

We care more and more about our emotional state. The quality of our life experience. The rise of meditation apps, podcasters like Sam Harris, and Tim Ferriss all point to self-improvement taking a new phase, managed by infinite learning from infinite content creation. The rise of supplements, self-care, psychedelics on stock markets, ketamine retreat centers, and an ever-growing stream of content about these macro trends all point to the central truth that people have increasingly high standards for self care and an ever-higher entitlement to epic life journeys.

Yet in all of this, our calendars focus on our day, our week, our year ahead.

(Microsoft office calendar screenshot vs awakening god avatar)

The New Wave of Calendar Apps Do The Same Better

There is a new generation of smarter AI-scanning calendar apps emerging out of each tribe in Silicon Valley, and across the world, where people are increasingly relying on non-Western calendars or multiple calendar systems running in parallel. The space industry faces perhaps the most challenging time synchronization challenges.

Respect for the founders, teams, and investors on this list:

https://twitter.com/sean_mcdonald/status/1495862389836816387

The Deep Time Investment Segment

Sundial is built on our own, propriety deep time calendar model. It relies on SCENE, our open source first principles time modeling engine. Deep Time is growing as a category of deep tech.

Deep tech basically refers to technology that takes on a substantial engineering challenge to be able to do something novel. In our case, modeling every millisecond of your life and forecasting how your behaviors will impact your life across a high parameterization schema that passes to AI.

An example of a hyper growth company modeling deep time is Timescale db, which just closed a giant round. This is just the beginning of new time tech.

https://twitter.com/acoustik/status/1496143175668350981

I have used time sequence data to manage a billion lives.

Getting time right matters in so many ways we don’t normally consider.

My own background includes working with time sequence data in IoT for indoor agriculture -- raising insects. Our software was collecting and responding to tens of thousands of points of sensor data per day — data points which controlled the environment for hundreds of millions of living things at a time, for which I was personally responsible. High consequence, high volume data taught me just how difficult it is to put large time models into practice, even with ML/AI and best of breed data management tools.

I wish TimescaleDB was around then, it looks great on first read about its features.

The Rise of Complex Forecasting at Low Cost

The cost of compute for even lifetime-scale data is so low it’s literally pennies for a single person’s whole life to run out in hundreds of thousands of events. Of course, a simulation can be tuned to be infinitely complex, but a forecast is practical. As I’m defining it for Sundial: where a simulation relies on a sequences of processes and loops, a forecast can do the same, but explicitly focuses on the part that’s usable for decision-making.

Sundial is built to model not just how you will spend time, but how your time spent impacts you. Like calorie analysis of your diet, but for your time.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-trillion-fold-increase-computing-power/

Forecasting Who You Might Be

By forecasting variables like the longevity impact of your time investments - presumably going for a bike ride generally maintains or adds a little life, eating cheeseburgers subtracts - Sundial can forecast how your behavior impacts your life time budget. We can look at how your time usage impacts your waistline, in theory, but that’s not the goal of our work. How you spend your time is likely how your bank account stacks up. How you spend your time is likely how your expenses add up.

I used to work in ad tech, where we could forecast which video you would watch next. These technologies and data models apply to more than your click behavior — they apply to your life.

Consequence and outcome mapping is at the core of much of the self-improvement movement, and books like 4,000 weeks, and countless others highlight the results of your time expenditures.

Sundial is a calendar that keeps a score. Literally. Per event, per millisecond spent.

Is it accurate? As much as the weather. Is it informative? For sure.

Bucket List Items Are Quick and Take a Long Time

You see the solar eclipse over Patagonia. It’s 3 minutes long. 3 minutes of your life. If your whole life were one day, this whole experience would be something like .0000000005% of that day. Humans probably cannot perceive anything that fast.

For you to be there in that moment took a lot more time that, though.

You hiked to the mountain top - 3 days You shopped, planned, mapped - 30 days You earned the money to shop, etc. - 30 days You hike down - 3 days You post about it - 1-3 days

To bucket list is to plan, to prepare, to synchronize, to coordinate. The more rare and short the event, the more likely it takes extreme measures to experience it. Want to see sunrise in Antarctica? It’s difficult. Want to see sunrise tomorrow? It’s relatively easy for almost everybody.

The expectations of consumers have soared in terms of their minimum viable experience of life. A new generation focused on self-fulfillment wants to coordinate their work and recreational experience. A subset of crypto-rich people want fulfillment and luxuriating from a diversity of experience so much that they are not just digital nomads, but wealthy digital nomads.

As simulation theory poses, we could each be our own character in a world of non-player characters - NPC’s to the initiated in video game culture - we can now upgrade our characters to global travelers for relatively little amounts of work and up front capital.

But it’s hard to actually do it. That’s where Sundial EDITOR service will help a lot.

Time Health

For most people, the headiness of simulation theory is not personally relevant. But relaxing and rejuvenating are, especially post-COVID. Among the many self-care and personal health management segments is time health.

Therapists and life coaches already focus heavily on proprietary walkthrough and workbook exercises that map out clients’ time allocation. Some are labeled as time, but probably mean energy spent on certain things for certain amounts of time — for good reasons, in the mental health world.

In meeting with leaders in the emergent retreat center industry, including those providing ketamine-based and soon psychedelic-based services, I’ve learned that remapping life choices is an essential part of their therapeutic protocol. Since this protocol is regulated and must be generally the same per class of patients, they often use the same processes even before there is a protocol for a new drug or treatment. These people often compare Sundial to family systems therapy.

Family systems therapy, which I know little about, includes structural and strategic systems and theories, which focus on how people interact. Anecdotally, a lot of practitioners say they start with the family schedule, or the literal family calendar — if they keep one on the wall.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is basically a combination of calendar and self-talk.

All of this can be summarized, for our purposes, as “Time Health.”

COVID and Content

During COVID, there has been an astounding surge in content consumption. By some accounts, Netflix is streaming 6 BILLION hours of content per month.

Some people see this as universally bad, but I think it’s more nuanced. In the earlier-referenced study, a distinction is drawn between watching for distraction from life’s problems and watching for shared social enjoyment. I would bet that’s why so many apps now have group watch mode and promote it so heavily.

I love stories. My dad was a screenwriter, and I spent my time in California living with filmmakers as roommates, when I was young. I loved talking about stories and filmmaking technique, and we teamed up in my career as an artist. But healthy watching habits ftw.

Sundial offers a powerful insight as to how much of your time - literally - is going to watching content, and how that impacts your other life choices that you can make. A lot of people snap out of it when they understand how much of their lives will go to behaviors they don’t plan.

(link)

How much time have I got doc? — End of Life Care

While Sundial doesn’t work in this space - yet - I’d love for us to get there. My personal experience is that people with scarce time budgets want to budget carefully and are surprisingly not squeamish about knowing how much time they’ve got. It’s the trope for the doctor delivering bad, terminal news: how much time have I got, doc?

I’m including this a bid to find people with expertise in this to talk about how Sundial could help people get the most out of the time they have.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/17/startups-at-ces-showed-how-tech-can-help-elderly-people-and-their-caregivers/

Life Coaching, Task Management, and Skill Mimicry Are All Time Management

Life coaching ultimately comes down to changing how people allocate time, whether functionally or emotionally. The common currency in all behavior change and career work is time and how it’s spent.

Like therapists, many life coaches start with calendar audits, and move on to scheduling, and time-based processes. Task management techniques are time management techniques.

The internet has enabled a new class of learning and apprenticeship: mimicry based on digital content. From how-to guides to DIY websites, from Youtube to MasterClass, there is a colossal industry built around mimicking skills and behaviors. All of these, too, come down to how to spend your time. Every secret process, tip or trick revealed requires times to do it — even things that may not seem like it shopping for recommended gear. Try doing it in zero seconds.

Ultimately Sundial will be a time mimicry app. If you are an investor who read this line, and you’d like to chat more, please contact me.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/24/what-the-masterclass-effect-means-for-edtech/

EDITOR, Character Player Mindset — The Rise of Simulation Theory Compatible Apps

Whether it’s tech CEO’s commenting on how billionaires they know consider most people non-player characters (NPC’s), Elon endorsing simulation theory, constant Nick Bostrom references, or headlines about reality being a hallucination — we are experiencing new interpretations of our own existence. Just a hundred years after quantum physics emerged from the stardust in homo sapiens minds, we now question if under the code we can see there is base code we cannot see. Perhaps its yet another religion; perhaps some new truth.

In either case, many adherents to this theory see it as a mechanism for liberation, philosophical justification to make the most of their individual lives. For those people who take simulation theory seriously, Sundial is a powerful near-metaphysical tool to edit your own storyline.

Our premiere in-person service runs off a piece of software called EDITOR.

Digital Twins — Done Your Way

Many - many - companies are building digital twins of you. Models of your past behavior, extrapolated into sequential series of odds that you will click, convert, engage, share, and so on. Some companies build digital twins for you to have an avatar inside a game, a metaverse, or META’sverse. Some build digital twins for you to get customized cancer drugs. Some build them to assess if you’re a security threat in a simulation model, if you work in high security industries. Your car might profile how you drive; your coffee pot might have a model of your behavior. Your smart devices definitely do. Google has a detailed model of you.

Bob Iger just joined Genies, Inc -- whose tagline is “Genies | The Fantasy Version of You” and is focused on accessorizing fantasy digital twins.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-walt-disney-robert-iger-heads-to-the-metaverse-11647259201

Sundial builds a model of who you want to be. An Aspirational Digital Twin. (tm)

I once worked for a small company called Mantrii that eventually became a part of a big credit card company, and we built ad buying models. Very sophisticated models of what a buyer might do. This, and experiences working with Fullscreen, and other video platforms led me to believe the scaffolding on which the metaverse will be built is ultimately a series of digital twins, customizations, predictions, and guidance as to who you will be.

It’s critically important that our digital twin process includes who we want to be. That’s what Sundial does in the tech ecosystem: Digital twins of who you want to be. Again, if you’re an interested investor, dm me?

https://venturebeat.com/2021/12/30/22-digital-twins-trends-that-will-shape-2022/

The Post-Awakening Market

As I have market tested Sundial EDITOR with dozens of users, one-one-one, often for hours at a time, I have come to see one thing in common with the people who value the experience the most: they have had some type of awakening in their life that has led them to want to upgrade their character, to be their best self.

That best self comes in a variety of formats, and often after a variety of punishing trials that teach us each who we want to be. Our own hero’s journey, our own life quest.

Awakenings are increasing exponentially. The rise of legal and “out” (above ground) psychedelic use is a driving factor in people making profound changes, and probably 10-20% of the people who tested Sundial EDITOR associated this experience with their past experiences of being “trippy” in a way akin to their prior psychedelic-induced experiences. With legislation changing, and legal treatment centers on the rise, the options are increasing for Sundial to be a service provider in this emergent space — when the time is right.

But people can awaken without any drugs, or any specific moment. Some people credit a practice like meditation or yoga. Some people are just high on life. Some people have a religious epiphany. Some have trauma that awakens a sense of urgency. Some people just have very long bucket lists, and would balk at being called awakened. But across each is a joie de vivre, a marked enthusiasm for the gift of consciousness.

But the biggest awakening to the shortness of time is rooted in something else. From what I can tell, COVID is an existential shock to many people’s systems, and they want to both make up for lost time, and embrace live itself. Whether it’s the loss of loved ones, or the lived experience of extreme quarantine, it has been a time of loneliness, loss of connection, and loss of experience. No culture or mindset separates any of us from that.

Life is too short, or too long, for me to allow myself the luxury of living it so badly.

Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

Act 3: A New Hope for the Future of Calendar Apps

Why clocks? Who needs them? After all, nature is the great time-giver (Zeitberg), and all of us, without exception, live by nature o’clock.

David S. Landed, Revolution in Time

10 Abusive Traits of Your Calendar

1. Do these activities make you feel good? Doesn’t matter.

2. I’m not here for what you have done, just what you haven’t.

3. Every entry must. be. the. same. format.

4. Bad weather day? Awww... Who cares 9am is 9am, fool.

5. I don’t care if you do the thing just tell me you did the thing.

6. Traveling? I don’t like that. Stay in the same time zone.

7. Doesn’t matter what you want to talk about things take 15 minute increments.

8. Forget to do something? Let me grey that out and automatically hide it for you.

9. You know what, give me control of your calendar and I will put your life on a website where other people can take your time when they want. For your job. Be a professional. Put your time out like a buffet line to pick at.

10. Won’t talk about death. Pretends time is infinite. Knows it’s scarce. Had emotional breakdown at Y2K -- legit thought world would glitch out of function.

Actually you know what? Do what I tell you. I’m watching now.

Do What You Got To Do, Then Do What We Sell You

Here’s an anecdotal taxonomy for how a lot of people divide time into classes:

1. What I have to do

2. Empty time, where I do passive stuff, and sometimes active stuff

Category 1 includes work, the dentist, sleeping, eating, etc. The second is everything from watching shows to shopping. Whatever season, culture, or habit require. This works great if you run a social media company, a content company, or a shopping company. It’s not so great if you are a human with scarce time, trying to make the most of it, experiential, professionally, and in your relationships of love and friendship.

Sundial breaks that system, turning life into a beautiful journey. Sundial increases intention in action, which is a key to happiness.

Sundial - Solving Real Problems for Real People

The people who have most appreciated the Sundial EDITOR experience have real problems to solve, and real goals to hit. Whether it’s directing a film, or raising a kid more intentionally, that’s what they care about.

Real user’s recurring problems have been:

1. COVID habits, especially too much social media and too much content

2. Loneliness from macro factors like economic, social, and cultural change

3. Career instability due to economic changes

4. Sadness, and in some cases depression, burnout, and other inflection points

5. Positive inflection point like graduation, career change, or retirement

But those aren’t the metrics by which those people want to design and measure their success. Those look more like this:

1. How many activities am I doing that stress me out?

2. How much time am I spending adding life to my timeline by exercise, or other healthy activities?

3. How much time am I losing to behaviors I don’t like engaging in?

4. How many intentional plans do I have in the calendar with loved ones?

Solving Real Problems Part 2: My Personal Experience “Dog Fooding” Sundial

To eat one’s own dog food — a venture capital term for using your own startup’s product to accomplish your relevant growth goals for the company.

As described in the beginning of this essay, my personal experience mapping out family stargazing trips led me to build Sundial. But Sundial has done much more than that for me. It’s time to tell my personal story with the app, briefly.

I’ll skip the first several Time/Bank prototypes, and my sincere thanks and apologies to the friends and family who spent several hours having a “time banker” - me - map out their time budgets, and planning their investment activities. It was..theatrical.

Here’s where Sundial counts for me: when I was a kid my dad wrote a book about the Gullah people, who lived freely on the coast, even at a time of slavery in Georgia. I grew up going to Savannah for his background research, and later my brother lived there. I remember eating in basement kitchens, where home chefs showed me what southern cooking was, the old way. While that may not exist the same way today as it did back then, using Sundial led to a long planning process with my wife, including grandparents. I’m proud to share we have plans to be in Savannah on March 14th, 2023 - 03.14 - to go on a tour of Southern pies. (I married a west coaster who knows not the ways of the great Charleston - Savannah pie corridor, which deserves to be the Napa of the south.)

It doesn’t stop there. This is the book of my life goals I had printed. And below it, a book of activities we’ve mapped out for my kids.

My wife and I go on exciting dates, from a list of life choices we care about. I have no shortage of projects and goals, and I feel fulfilled in my life quest, for the most part.

Around my house, when making choices about how to spend time, we often say “in a sundial kind of way…” when thinking about what matters in life. I’m proud of that.

Feeding my kids dog food / Sundial for Kids

My kids also benefit from a version of Sundial, a printed one, custom made for them.

I teach my kids they are made of the future. I teach my kids what I’m working on. I teach my kids why it’s important. Over time, my daughter - who is six - wanted her own Sundial book. So she worked with me to make a book of icons showing her favorite things, and some chores. We use it about half of weekends. Our diversity of activity is broad. From forts to fairy houses, obstacle courses to oatmeal. We love it.

We teach our kids they are made of stardust, and that the dinosaurs are our ancestors. I see already how Sundial will mature into a product that supports their personal growth and development, when they’re older. I will do my best to make it that for them.

If you’d be interested in getting a Sundial kids activity book, please email me sean at sundialcalendar.com.

But Wait -- How is any of this a calendar?

The Sundial web app is just the beginning of our DIY tool stack. EDITOR exports to gCal, iCal, and Outlook.

Budget of Conscious Hours and The Sundial Metaphor

I’ve tested about a dozen types of metrics - from how much time might earn to how it might impact your calorie burn - and what seems to matter is, first and foremost, how much time do I have? That’s how Sundial became Sundial. The metaphor is: if you were born at sunrise and die at sunset, what time is it right now, in the day of your life?

This consolidation of your whole life down to a day makes it simple enough to see how your time spent from here forward will play out. The natural next question is: how much time do I have to spend how I want do spend it? That’s the Budget of Conscious Hours (BCH). It’s how much time you have left, with sleep subtracted.

(We’ll be adding more and more options to refine your BCH over time. It should be close enough to give you an idea right now. Check it out in the web app. It takes about 30 seconds.

Once people know their BCH, they want to see how much a specific Activity “costs” from their budget. The BCH is a scarce thing, and each Activity you commit to takes a deduction from it.

So each calendar activity you plan is spending a percentage of your whole life. That’s exactly how life works.

Metrics That Matter for your Aspirational Digital Twin (tm)

Once people create an Aspirational Digital Twin (tm), they tend to run a few forecasts of how its life goes. They want to see how it plays out to act a few different ways. Often they change out bucket list items. Hike Everest, or write a novel? Your 40’s will struggle to provide enough time for both, unless you have a lot of free time. (And coffee?)

The key metrics people seem to care about, beyond Intent, which is the core of all of this, seem to be:

1. Mimetic Model — am I doing the things I envision my identity to do?

2. Longevity — how does this impact how long I will live? Does is shorten or extend life?

3. Happiness — will be I be happy planning and doing these things?

4. Relationship Consistency — am I being a good friend, partner, sibling, etc.?

5. Financial Planning — am I aligning my dreams with my day job? How much do I need to live all the adventures I want to live?

6. Free Time — how can I find time to do more of what I love? Less of what I don’t love?

Forecasting > Simulation

At first, I was building a simulation tool, and looking for simulation experts. Now I understand: Sundial is a forecasting tool. We can estimate how your life might go, but providing a persistent simulation is both exponentially more complex and expensive. It also raises ethical questions about what’s health for self-awareness, and potentially getting task planning dopamine instead of doing dopamine. More than one credible entrepreneur or investor has also pointed out it raises, for some people, metaphysical, religious, and cultural questions.

Our human minds are not conditioned to handle the amount of data Sundial churns out, and real prediction is as impossible as it is for forecasting the weather at an exact millisecond of 2049.

Our Data Model: First Principles Model of Human Time Expenditures

You will definitely eat. And drink. And go to the bathroom.

You almost certainly will use a phone. You will sleep.

It may vary, but there are things nearly all of us do. The more interconnected our global systems get, the more similar those uses of time become. Video games never existed, but now make up huge percentages of people’s lives.

Perhaps most important: time is scarce for us all. Nobody lives to 400 years old. Most people live many decades now. But we pass. Ashes to ashes; dust to dust.

Many things are predetermined, and many things have bounds of physics, biology, policy, or principle. For example, if you are in your 40’s and wear glasses, playing the “fighter jet pilot” character is off the table. If you are in your 20’s, spending time with your grandkids is out.

Things also take time. You can’t watch a show in a minute. You can’t go sailing in an hour. You can’t skydive for 3 minutes.

As Sundial EDITOR progressed, I realized that what I was building was a first principles database of human time expenditures. As Sundial progresses, you’re going to hear a lot more about this.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1235294922716180481

Sundial as a Way of Understanding Life

Your data structure must align with your life philosophy. As witnessed by crypto.

As I have built Sundial over the past year, at first slowly as a side project, then full time for six months now, what I have learned is time is what we think of it.

Just like the sun will set, our time will pass. I believe consciousness needs better tools to plan individual experiments. We are each an experiment, emergent temporarily from the stardust, held together in what Buckminster Fuller described as a temporary “integrity” — a cluster of emergent self-organizing components that results in self-aware consciousnesses for a cosmic flash of time.

Sundial started as a better calendar, but now shapes my thinking for how the world to come will work. We will all play many characters. We will download new skills quickly. We will optimize processes, and effective mimicry will give us near superpowers for new skills. This will results in a long list of experiences to experience.

At the same time, the reward for sharing, connecting, posting, commenting..it has put double pressures on being cool. For thine own self, be cool.

What I love about the Sundial metaphor is that the sundial, unlike any human clock, exists whether we want it to be there or not; whether humans exist or not. The shadows of trees surely fell before Homo sapiens. Clever animals track the sun. Time passes, and the sundial passively observes that.

The first Sundial was found outside a goddess temple in Ancient Egypt. Since the advent of mathematical thinking, we have been using the sun to track the time of day, and the moon to track the day itself — or really, the lunar cycle.

I like to think of Sundial as an artifact from the future.

I’m not the only one embracing a new theory of time.

https://twitter.com/packyM/status/1493226066789478402

But can I just do the thing in a minute? I’m busy.

Yes. Presenting the Sundial Web App.

The Sundial EDITOR process is incredible. “Life changing.” People really say that.

But it takes hours. It’s complex. It would take days to map you whole life. We can model about 6-10 Activities per hour of configuration. This is great for our in-person operations, and core to our approach to market.

BUT people want to do things quickly. We all want the 1 minute proof of concept.

So, working with a great independent web developer, José del Valle, creator of KnobsAI and other cool apps, we’ve built a web app. It calculates your Budget of Conscious Hours just deducting sleep, and runs the numbers on a single activity like Date Nights.

This is limiting. Obviously EDITOR can visualize your whole future, and this is forecasting - in a simple way - your behavior from one activity. But it’s fun, and works, and people respond to it well in early testing.

I hope you’ll check it out. One out of every 100 web app users earns a free EDITOR session for themselves or as a gift to give to someone at an inflection point in life.

https://app.sundialcalendar.com/share?meta=eyJubSI6IlNlYW4gTWNEb25hbGQiLCJhdCI6MjY5LCJhaSI6MCwidHUiOjIsImFnIjo0MCwibGUiOjEwMCwibnQiOjEsIm55Ijo2MCwiaHMiOjIuMjUsInN0Ijo2LjV9

Alpha Web App Limitations

There is no user registration system, but account claiming will come soon. You can’t edit the event names. You can’t time travel yet. All soon.

A Note On Inventing Time Travel

It was late at night. I made an update to EDITOR and all of the sudden, I could type in a date and time, and get a forecast for my life at that point. Where would I be? What would I have completed? How old are my kids? How many barbecues have I gone to? How many date nights with my amazing wife?

Like a full proper grown up, I typed in April, 20, 2069 at 4:20pm.

But then I got more serious. My wife and I often talk about our little kids as though they were adults about to join our conversation — it’s a good way to be a good parent, or at least to try. We talk about “28 year old Jackson” as though that person will show up any minute, and what she would want. Seeing that we’d have maybe 20 stargazing trips with Grandpa between now and then brought a tear to my eye.

Ever since I was a kid, I have wanted to invent time machines. I used to sit in the garage, building boards full of nails tied together with wires. I would offer to take neighbors to see the dinosaurs. When my mom was late for work, I would zap her backwards to make it ok.

Now I’m more concerned about going forwards, in ways that make me more present, intentional, and connected in the present.

Time Travel in VR

I’ve been using the Vive Flow and Quest 2 and they’re great. You can go anywhere you want. Soon you will be able to go to any time you want. Our role in that is to allow you to meet any you that you want to meet. For the last time, if you’re an investor reading this and interested, please email me sean at sundialcalendar.com.

This is How We End — Literally

During the week I’ve been writing this, new research has been published that shows the brain may very well flash the entire life before your mind’s eye before you pass away. A summary visualization of your whole life, in moments.

I think that may have happened to me when I had that near death experience, now almost precisely half my life ago. What I learned then, try to live now, teach my kids, and want to offer the world is this: in that moment, we flash not on our fortune, not on our job titles, not on our wallets and NFTs. We flash on our life we lived. Most of that is with people, but some are just helluva moment moments we have by ourselves, like a great book, or long bath.

Many people who have had near death experiences undergo some type of awakening and transition. I hope Sundial offers that benefit, without all the pain. The ability to grow the way you choose. If we can do that sooner, we may live a much better, richer life and pass down a legacy of empowerment, discovery, and curiosity.

https://blog.frontiersin.org/2022/02/22/what-happens-in-our-brain-when-we-die/

THANK YOU!

I’m committed to helping as many people as possible live the life they need - and want - to live. We have a new world to build. Thanks for reading.

Sean

Time After Time: A Reading List

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https://twitter.com/sean_mcdonald/status/1501946390053744651

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicomachean_Ethics

https://bookshop.org/books/the-wheel-of-time-the-shamans-of-mexico-their-thoughts-about-life-death-and-the-universe/9780743412803

https://bookshop.org/books/the-alchemist-9780062315007/9780062315007

https://bookshop.org/books/the-order-of-time/9780735216112

https://bookshop.org/books/the-time-collector/9781250169235

https://bookshop.org/books/a-new-earth-awakening-to-your-life-s-purpose-9780452289963/9780452289963

https://bookshop.org/books/hbr-s-10-must-reads-on-managing-yourself-with-bonus-article-how-will-you-measure-your-life-by-clayton-m-christensen/9781422157992

https://bookshop.org/books/the-sun-is-a-compass-my-4-000-mile-journey-into-the-alaskan-wilds-9780316414449/9780316414449

https://bookshop.org/books/kant-groundwork-of-the-metaphysics-of-morals-6cde8045-550a-4d53-be85-727330e805d9/9781107401068

https://bookshop.org/books/man-s-search-for-meaning-9780807014271/9780807014271

https://bookshop.org/books/a-joseph-campbell-companion-reflections-on-the-art-of-living-9780060926175/9780060926175

https://bookshop.org/books/awaken-the-giant-within/9780671582081

https://bookshop.org/books/the-4-hour-workweek-escape-9-5-live-anywhere-and-join-the-new-rich-expanded-updated/9780307465351

https://bookshop.org/books/opus-postumum/9780521319287

https://bookshop.org/books/becoming-supernatural-how-common-people-are-doing-the-uncommon/9781401953119

https://bookshop.org/books/four-thousand-weeks-time-management-for-mortals/9780374159122

https://bookshop.org/books/critical-path-9780312174910/9780312174910

https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Time-Clocks-Revised-Enlarged/dp/0674002822

https://bookshop.org/books/atomic-habits-an-easy-proven-way-to-build-good-habits-break-bad-ones/9780735211292