Try our web app, or book a time to edit your life story.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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