Sometimes we get surprising little reminders of how quickly the time is flying by. For example, have you ever started and then abandoned a project only to notice it, unfinished, months later? I do that all the time. I’ll notice a stack of papers in a corner of my office or a household item I was repairing and realize, with some annoyance, that it had been sitting there for two months.

Projects go unfinished for months because we spend too much time using a shorter-term focus. We’re usually thinking in terms of what to get done today or what we’ll be doing next week. Being suddenly reminded that several months have passed since I did this or thought about that can be shocking, because a month is a fairly noticeable chunk of your life.

Sometimes, we need to turn our focus to a farther horizon and think in terms of what the year will bring and what our five year plan is. And then we switch back to thinking about now or nearly now to actually get things done.

Even when we’re doing a great job of planning way ahead and then focusing on the tasks before us, it’s easy to lose perspective. Hence, stacks of papers that go unsorted for months.

As I was thinking about these issues, it occurred to me that a month is a pretty good medium-horizon measure of time. Seconds and minutes are so numerous that our supply seems virtually infinite (it’s not, but it sure feels that way). We plan our daily routine by hours, and think in terms of days when planning the big events in our lives, like work days, school days, weekends, traveling, and special occasions. Then, when we get seriously future oriented, we usually think in terms of years — ages of people we know, years when memorable events happened, years to go until a major milestone is achieved.

The only downside to thinking of the future in terms of years is that years take so long to pass that it’s easy to lose focus. Whatever will happen in a year or more is a long way away.

I’m a big believer in reminding yourself how limited your time is, so that you focus on making the best, most enjoyable use of your time. Sometimes I consider the time I have left until I reach an important milestone by which I hope to have accomplished many things. I’m pretty young, so I usually think of age 40 as the beginning of the downhill slide into fogeydom. If you’ve already passed the big four-oh, then you can choose a different age. Or you could count down to a different milestone, such as when you’ll graduate from college or when you’ll take your next vacation.

To help me keep the medium-term in focus, I think of the months I have remaining until that important milestone. Years pass too slowly to notice, and days pass so quickly that you lose the sense of urgency. Let’s use the example of someone tracking the next 16 years. If you’re counting down 5,840 days until a certain date, every new day whittles down that number by such a small amount that it hardly seems changed. By contrast, if you just decrement the number 16 once a year, it would take forever to notice a change. Counting the months until a far away date offers the best chance to develop a sense of both the length and the passage of that time, both mentally and emotionally.

Counting down 192 months instead of 16 years or 5,840 days is ideal. A new month happens often enough that tracking your progress by month has real meaning. Years are so far off that we can’t see them; days are so numerous that we can’t see past what’s in front of us. Months are the perfect way to track medium and longer term goals.

To give me a realistic sense of the passage of “big” time that I can’t get with “small” time, I created a Dashboard widget for Mac OS X. My Month Clock counts down the months until a certain date in the future. You can flip it over and enter the date of your choice, as well as a label to describe what you’re tracking. It defaults to the label “months until 40,” meaning how many months remain until I turn 40, but you can change it to whatever date or milestone suits you.

I have to add that I did not create this widget entirely on my own. It was originally called Digital World Clock, developed by Mat Schaffer, and released under the GPL. Since it’s been a long time since I was seriously into programming, I took the easy route of modifying a widget that already did what I wanted. I simply changed it to count months and now I’m releasing it under the GPL.

You can download Month Clock here. Use it to gain a better perspective on the years ahead. Maybe you’ll glance at it one day and think “Shoot! There goes another month!” and remember to go through that pile in the corner.

Technical notes: Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. If you’re using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it. If you’re using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

Related posts:

1. How to Decide What You Should Do With Your Life
2. What I Learned During My Blogging Trial
3. Strive for More or Be Satisfied Where You Are?
4. Goal Setting on iPhone with Goal Meter
5. Retirement is a Scam