1/ Good morning, @RoamResearch early-adopter community, I& #39;d like to ask your input on a concept. (that& #39;s why I am putting the "Roamsignal" up in the clouds.)

The topic of this thread is, "Elegant Calendars in Complex Worlds", and it& #39;s about Calendars, and how we want them to be.
2/ "Elegant" is a word that I am using here, in the way that mathematicians use it - that is:"elegant solutions" are simple pathways through complex territories - a concept that software engineers sometimes call "Simplexity".

@RoamResearch, as of this writing, is highly Simplex.
3/ For example, it doesn& #39;t really have a fully fledged calendaring system - yet.

Dated entries have some functionality, but we can& #39;t yet do many of the things that, e.g., Google Calendar can do. No monthly views, no programmably-recurring events, no quick social sharing.
4/ But this doesn& #39;t have to be a limitation - I think it might be an opportunity:

*What if we rethink the calendar entirely?*

What if we question the arbitrary structure of what we currently have - and try to break it down to its atomic basis?
5/ (P.S., if you need Google Calendar RN, no worries, it& #39;s a trivial thing to throw a hyperlink into your daily note-page; and macro-generators like TextExpander you can automatically always bring up your current-day view, in G-Calendar... but that& #39;s an aside, here ...)
6/ Because ... what if we re-built the very concept of a calendar, from scratch?

What if @RoamResearch could disrupt the hierarchy of existing calendars, in some of the same ways it has disrupted the hierarchies within existing knowledge-systems?

I have some ideas... https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="đŸŒ±" title="Setzling" aria-label="Emoji: Setzling">https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="đŸŒ±" title="Setzling" aria-label="Emoji: Setzling">https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="đŸŒ±" title="Setzling" aria-label="Emoji: Setzling">
7/ We can& #39;t just toss the anchor to the Gregorian Calendar.

It& #39;s the basis of our "common language" around time- at least for the large portion of the world that has adopted it.

But maybe the anchor should be minimal,

+ the tools built on top of it, as flexible as possible.
8/In a sense the "Daily Note" is that anchor.

But what else do we need?

I propose a particular kind of data-structure, which I would call a "cycle".

A week is a cycle. It& #39;s a kind of variable that can have seven values, dependent on time. A month is a cycle; so is a year.
9/ (Frustratingly, the cycles of "week", "month", and "year" don& #39;t really align. And "year" doesn& #39;t really even align with "day")

But that& #39;s precisely why it would be wonderful to "define" them independently;

INSTEAD of the implicit question of G-cal:

"What day is this?" -->
10/ We would ask a much more powerful question:

"What are the cycles, to which this day belongs?"

AND we would have the power to define those cycles ourselves.

(Yes - anchored to Gregorian-calendar cycles, if needed.)

but the Gregorian calendar is just a starting point.
11/ Cycles of birthdays, relationships, academic years, biz quarters, aren& #39;t really contained within the Gregorian calendar.

In far more important psychological ways, they DEFINE the Gregorian calendar.

What if we respected that hierarchy, within our own organizing systems?
12/ What I& #39;m suggesting is that a "cycle" be a primary kind of data-structure for building calendars, and that its existence be entirely user-defined, included its relationship with all the other "cycles" within any given calendar.

The "cycle" deserves to be the "atomic unit".
13/ You would "build" yr days, weeks, months and years out of defined "cycles". They could map + anchor to the Gregorian Calendar, but wouldn& #39;t BE the Gr& #39;gor& #39;n Calendar.

For a beautiful example, just look at the "ToDo" checkbox, which is a tiny example of

"a bi-valent cycle."
14/ It marks time -

Time before (time of intent); time of completion (done); time after.

It& #39;s a tiny marker of "entropy-locally-decreasing", in your personal world.

Lots of other things could work this way.

Some maybe would need to be automated, like the cycle "Week" -
15/ For obvious, practical reasons, we would need to be able to "define that" as a circular cycle that increments through seven steps.

But if that cycle could be nested within other cycles, some of them user-defined, and also have other things nested within it -
16/ We& #39;d have something very powerful.

Lots of things could be neatly "fit" within a flexible structure of things-in-time that both contain-and-are-contained.

Projects are cycles. Spaced repetition study is a cycle. Friends& #39; birthdays are cycles. Academic years are cycles.
17/ From trivial things (want to read-->reading-->finished reading, applied to a book) to big things (completing a Ph.D maybe, launching a new company, seeing a kid graduate) the "cycles" we define, each wi/ their beginnings, intermediates, and conclusions, are how we plan lives.
18/ Is there a way we can make the "cycle" primary?

I think there might be. And I think @RoamResearch offers us some amazing tools to do so.

What I am imagining is a calendar that doesn& #39;t look like boxes in a grid, but more like ripples on a pond.
19/ Something that might help us rethink our relationship, to time itself.

"The most authentic endings, are the ones that are already revolving to a new beginning" - Sam Shepard

alright, thread over. /fin/.

comments welcome.
20/ @Malcolm_Ocean , @kcorazo , @RoamBrain , @Mappletons , @CatoMinor3, @JoelChan86 , @RobertHaisfield - specifically wondering if you guys might have any thoughts on the above thread -

TIA if you have anything to add/question/clarify here, etc etc.
21/ @anthilemoon would love to hear if you have any thoughts on the above, too - especially in light of the idea that "calendars are really just maps of time"

Wondering if your map-thinking explorations, might have led you to any more elegant solutions, here.

TIA.
22/ Wait WHAT I wrote this thread about calendars, and time, and I forgot to ask the one person I know who is a full time historian AND an early Roam adopter (that would be @calhistorian) -

Mark, any ideas on the above thread?

TIA for any thoughts you might have on the topic!
23/ and also... @codexeditor, do you have any further thoughts on the best data-structures to use, for flexible and powerful representation of the unfolding of events, through time?
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