Noticing where the time goes

Plain answers about looking at your own time: the arithmetic behind the numbers, what each one is good for, and where each one stops being useful. Written to stand up whether or not you ever install this app.

• Life in weeks or life in years: which grid actually helps

  The famous version of this chart gives you one square per week, and a little over four thousand squares. There is a good argument for one square per year instead, and it is not that the weeks version is wrong — it is that nobody can point at a square and say what happened in it.

• How many hours a day are actually yours

  Every clock app can tell you how many hours are left today. That number is close to useless, because a large part of it is already committed to being asleep. Here is the subtraction that makes it usable, and what changes once you start reading the corrected figure instead.

• How many weekends are left this year — and why that is the better number

  Days remaining in the year is a number that sounds urgent and changes nothing. Weekends remaining is a number you can act on, because it counts the units you actually have discretion over. Here is how to count them and what to do with the answer.

• What an hour a day costs over a lifetime

  A daily habit has a price in years, and the conversion is a single line of arithmetic that almost nobody performs. Here is the formula, worked examples you can redo with your own numbers, and an argument about why the yearly figure changes behaviour when the daily one does not.

• Is counting the days you have left morbid?

  Sometimes, and for some people it is genuinely the wrong thing to look at. This is an honest attempt to separate the version that gives perspective from the version that produces dread, including how to tell which one you are having and when to stop.