Timeline
Create a timeline to visually show ‘when’: how multiple objects are related in time.
we experience time differently when we Sleep, Daydream, or when we’re experiencing [[ Flow ]], and while that’s part of what it means to be human, we can learn a lot if we create a coordinate system for time.
Our experience of time can vary considerably based on what we’re doing and what state our minds are in; in order to understand time more accurately, we need ways to make it consistent.
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This is one of the six visual frameworks identified by Dan Roam in his book The Back of the Napkin, each answering one of the key questions: who/what, how much, where, when, how, and why. A timeline answers a “when” question.
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We experience reality in terms of time. Our whole concept of causality is in a context of time where one thing happens and causes something else to happen, later in time. In trying to “set in order the facts of our experience,” time is one of the main ways we order things.
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A timeline is a visual way to represent time, and if you place events in order on the timeline, you can get a visual sense of the order of events. The whole question of causation versus correlation is not answered by a timeline; all it can do is show when events happened relative to each other. It shows the events’ relationships based on their positions in time.
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Timelines can have lots of different scales. A timeline with increments in years is a good way to get an overview of a lifetime. One in increments of centuries might illustrate the broad strokes of human innovation, and a logarithmic scale helps understand the huge spans of geologic time. On the other end of the scale, a timeline with increments of zeptoseconds (a billionth of a trillionth of a second or 10-21 seconds) might be useful for graphing nuclear reactions at the quantum scale.
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Timelines can be straight of circular. There are many events in our experience that are cyclical, like the repeating of weekly schedules or the seasons of the year. These can be represented visually as loops. And these kinds of loops are core to systems thinking.
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In solving problems, a timeline can help us understand things like gestation periods and how the problem is likely to change over time so we can anticipate the problem we will face by the time our solution can be implemented.
Therefore:
Create a timeline to visually show ‘when’: how multiple objects are related in time.
Time loops are a big part of a systems Flowchart, showing cyclical processes