Why use the Arvelie time system?
I’ve implemented the Arvelie time system, which I found documented here on
Devine Lu Linvega’s site. (Update
2024-12-30: I’ve since moved onto a less obscure, but similar date format of
[year]-[week][day]. The post is still relevant though for those interested in
the affect of using alternate date formats).
I wrote my initial thoughts on the time system in, The Arvelie time system.
But why actually use it? Particularly, when I, unlike Devine do not live on a boat and do need to exist much more rigidly within the dark ages of the Gregorian calendar.
For me it’s for two main reasons.
- Treating the beginning of a project as year 0 creates a closer relationship to the project.
- This site is not a news site.
Additionally, Arvelie time offers a much cleaner framework for project planning and time management. In the Gregorian calendar a “month” of work can be anywhere between 28 to 31 days. A “month” in Arvelie is 14 days, always.
A closer relationship to a project
This website is a personal project. Not just the source code, but the projects, posts and artefacts that get presented on it. I am also a personal project (WIP). 2020 was the year when my direction in life began to steer in a very different direction (moving from a life in music to a life in software development).
Strangely enough, before any of that was apparent, and before Covid-19 hit, I had started a physical journal mid 2019 and titled in Paradigm Shift. I later released the music I was making at the time under the same title.
By embedding the age of a project within time, time itself becomes a member of the project, rather than its usual function — a tool to categorize and sort all historical and future events.
I developed that impression very quickly when browsing through Devine’s website. Seeing time stamps in Arvelie communicated the progression of the work within the context of the Devine Lu Linvega / xxiivv project, rather than a universal point in time.
A nice side effect is that the connotations of a timestamp is also removed. If I see a timestamp somewhere in the range of 2020-2022 I think “Covid-19”. On Devine’s site 2020-2022 would be represented as 14A00-16A00.
Sometimes that context can bolster the character of a work. But other times it can hinder it. When browsing a blog for example, it’s easy to go back a year or two and begin to characterise the posts as “old”, even though the topics may be completely relevant or even more relevant — it’s no secret that to see the future, we need to look into the past.
Arvelie time allows for a less ‘flavoured’ interpretation of the artefact, and brings Time on board as a project member, rather than a standard universal measuring stick.
This site is not a news site
The posts I’ve made so far may include some references to current happenings, like learning in the prehistoric age of AI, but I’m not reporting on events.
Because of this, regular dates are not nearly as important.
In any case, Arvelie time maps perfectly to the Gregorian calendar. It’s just a cleaner way to divide up spans of time. I built an Arverlie converter that I use in all my blog and diary templates. In my logs I reveal the regular date if you hover over the Arvelie time stamp on an individual log page, like the log page for today.
One concession
Technical blog posts are not suited for Arvelie time. People need to know the date of a technical post to get an idea of how outdated the tools now are.
Particularly in the web domain or when learning a new tool or language, things move so fast that a technical tutorial a year or two old can land you with in a sub-optimal or completely dated solution.
This is why I use the regular date system for my technical posts.