"Logarithmic". That's the word I needed. I've been trying to visualize a calendar that captures everything from seconds to years (akin to the marvelous but abandoned "once around the sun" work some years back), and at last pondering was wondering how to scale a spiral-of-spirals-of... which would capture the cyclic nature of our model of time; problem was scaling. Some application of logarithmic scaling may work...
See <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1248496" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1248496</a> and especially <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1248922" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1248922</a> for another discussion of the same idea.
The 43 folders system bears some resemblance to this idea. If you haven't already heard about it a hundred times, it's about having 31 "day of month" folders - the shorter time frame, plus 12 "month" folders - the longer time frame. The shuffling of tasks is pretty obvious: the tasks from upcoming month get reshuffled into their respective day folders. You could extend it with one or two more levels (year? decade?) and get something similar to what the author describes.
Would love this for a paper calendar.<p>I remember being stumped by the same problem of wanting a better overview over periods of time, and so came up with a scrollable-zoomable-timeline visualization called LineTime (<a href="http://www.linetimeapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.linetimeapp.com</a>). Smooth pinch-to-zoom and it displays days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries.<p>At this point, LineTime isn't a productivity app but a history timeline. But actually I like this idea almost better for a productivity tool, since it enables you to "compartmentalize" a bit better than with a flowing timeline like LineTime.
This is a great idea, and fits nicely with the observation that humans seem to perceive many things, including time, logarithmically:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber–Fechner_law" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber–Fechner_law</a>
I posted a submission to the JavaScript 10K apart competition last year which was an HTML5 calendar utilizing localStorage. It essentially gave you a view of all twelve upcoming months in a snapshot. Perhaps even something as simple as this would help with the visual aspect. As far as the "bindings" are concerned, I think you could use tabs along the top and do some redesigning for the different timeframes.<p><a href="http://10k.aneventapart.com/1/Entry/233" rel="nofollow">http://10k.aneventapart.com/1/Entry/233</a>
I actually created a logarithmic calendar app for a class a few years ago... Maybe I'll dig it out, update it and post since other people seem to like the idea...
Spot on. I feel quite sure people do think in something like this way. I've thought about it in the past as well and have been working on some similar ideas for mapping: <a href="http://danieljmaxwell.tumblr.com/post/12074739965/a-better-kind-of-mapping" rel="nofollow">http://danieljmaxwell.tumblr.com/post/12074739965/a-better-k...</a>
Combining this long-range view with a short-range view like SpiraClock ( <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2605709" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2605709</a> ) might be an interesting app.
Dave Allen's <i>Getting Things Done</i> suggests having multiple levels of task/tactical/strategic/life tracking and review, roughly like you are describing, although doesn't suggest a special view for it.