Paper Doll’s Ultimate Guide to Memento Mori and Appreciating Your Time
Pardon me, handsome stranger, would you happen to know the time?
I can’t find a trace of 1988 or ’89.
If you see the daredevil ghost of my youth go racing by (woah-yeah)
Will you flag him down and let him know I’ll be running a good ways behind?
A Tall Stand of Pines, ©1998 Jeff Holmes/The Floating Men (From the album The Song of the Wind in the Pines)
If you’ll indulge me, let’s start with the inspiration for this post. Last weekend, after five years of avoiding all large groups out of an abundance of COVID caution, I did something essential for my mental health. I saw my favorite band in concert two nights in a row.
I started seeing The Floating Men perform in 1993, and went to just about every gig near me until the last time they performed in Chattanooga, in 2010. I’d also seen them in Johnson City and Nashville, TN, and most memorably, for 30th birthday (with family and friends) in Atlanta.
Their songs range from keening heartbreakers to joy-filled romps, all with complex lyrics and reflecting a louche, delightfully misspent life. I am an old, overly cautious soul, so I’ve lived a misspent youth vicariously through those songs. Seeing The Floating Men’s live made me unceasingly happy.
The Floating Men, Barrelhouse Ballroom, January 19, 2025
The bandmates’ “real” careers took them all over the country, so it had been a long time since they played together. But the fandom, The Floatilla, remains loyal. When the band scheduled one Nashville show in 2024, it sold out in moments; they added another night, and the same thing happened; and a third night. No tickets for me. But for this year, they scheduled one (and then two) shows in Chattanooga, and five years of caution gently stepped aside. Echoing Robert Frost, I can only say, “And that has made all the difference.”
In Act V, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Richard II, the erstwhile king bemoans that:
I wasted Time and now doth Time waste me.
King Richard II was indecisive, squandered opportunities, and was forced to relinquish his crown. Time was once a resource he could have directed, but once imprisoned, time became a force that eroded his life and meaning.
Last week, in How to Use Time Tracking to Improve Your Productivity, I wrote about time tracking as a tool for mindfully ensuring that your actions align with your goals and values. That post focused on the minutes and the hours, the nitty-gritty of our lives.
However, I keep coming back to the expression, “The days are long, but the years are short.” We “manage” our time (our days), seeking out new ways to be efficient and get specific tasks done. But fewer of us are adept at working on the bigger picture, making sure that the larger aspects of our lives intentionally arc toward meaning.
Today, we’ll look at how we perceive time and ways to elevate our appreciation of the passage of it in order to organize a life that better reflects what we want. We’ll also review tools to help us achieve a more ongoing sense of mindfulness about the passing of the days (and years) of our lives.
APPRECIATE THE SPEED OF TIME
When Daylight Saving returns, and you Google (for the seventh time) how to change the clock in your car, do you grumble that it feels like we just fell back, and now we were springing ahead? But you’ve also sat in interminably long meetings, shocked that each glance at the clock shows only a minute has passed.
What time “is” and what it feels like can be very different.
Time is a precise, but in some ways, arbitrary set of measurements for something we have never fully understood. St. Augustine believed that time actually just “sits between our ears.” There’s no actual external, objective, universal time; our measurement of time has (mostly) become culturally accepted, but it’s just by collective agreement that we measure time in 60 increments of seconds, 60 minutes, etc.
(Admittedly, the 24-hour day is fairly fixed by the Earth’s rotations, but the number of days in a year is a convention. The Jewish calendar, for example, has lunar months, 28 days each; to make up for the “extra” time, there’s an additional month in a leap year.)
For more on the history, philosophy, psychology, physics, and neuroscience of time, I recommend In Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation by Alan Burdick.
In a BBC article from September, Why Children Perceive Time Slower Than Adults, Teresa McCormack, a professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Belfast, notes that children’s comprehension of time is understudied. We know that tiny humans’ concepts of linear time are limited, and their understanding of time as a dimension (with a sense of duration) is slow to develop.
Adults, however, have both the vocabulary to mark spans of time and understanding of how time works:
- time is unidirectional and linear (outside of time travel movies)
- time is unified such that there is only one timeline (again, outside of fiction), and
- time is event-independent (meaning it’s objective, continuing while we sleep, and existing independent of human perception). Trippy!
But aside from vocabulary and complex neurology, why do kids experience time as moving quickly but it seems to pass more quickly as we age?
One simple answer, explained well on the Inverted Passions blog, is that we have a biological imperative for survival which prompts us to take note of anything that helps us make predictions regarding the future.
Investment legalese says “past performance does not guarantee future results,” but we know that things that worked for us before (or conversely, that caused awkwardness or danger) might happen again; our brains hold onto whatever helps us make predictions. But, when something novel happens, our brains stop and pay attention!
When you’re little, everything is novel. Every experience, whether the cause-and-effect of flipping a light switch or what a sneeze feels like, is new. That’s why we have granular memories of our youths through our college days, but why, other than our first days on a job or meeting our significant others, the rest of adulthood starts to blend fuzzily together.
Our adult lives are routinized; patterns repeat; life whizzes by. Yesterday is like tomorrow is like January 87th; it’s all the same. But we remember each day of our big vacations, doing new things in new places, perhaps with new people.
Predictability helps keep us alive, anthropologically-speaking, but novelty is what allows us to reflect on a life well-lived.
Predictability helps keep us alive, anthropologically-speaking, but novelty is what allows us to reflect on a life well-lived. Share on XMEMENTO MORI AND THE PASSAGE OF TIME
Are you familiar with the term memento mori? It’s Latin, meaning “Remember you must die.”
A reminder of the fleeting nature of life and our impending mortality may sound depressing, but it’s been used in literature, art, and architecture, and as a meditative practice, throughout history. None of us gets out alive, so we need to make our lives more about meaningful moments and less about to-do lists rivaling the length of CVS receipts.
Memento mori helps us realign our priorities — or at least take note when we are not living according to our stated values.
It’s worth revisiting Toxic Productivity Part 3: Get Off the To-Do List Hamster Wheel, where I wrote the following:
REVISITING FINITUDE: THE MACRO AND MICRO APPROACH
Our time on this rock is limited. A central tenet of Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals is the ability to see the shortness of life, examine your goals and values, and maximize spending your time on what matters most. This isn’t some hippy-dippy philosophy that says that if we all stop worrying about work or making money, we’ll find ourselves in a vast utopia.
Rather, it notes that life is hard, life is short, and feeling like you only have a right to be here if you’re accomplishing things that make money — whether for your company or yourself (even, or especially, if you are your company) — leads to frittering away the most valuable commodity: life.
Tim Urban’s stellar Wait But Why blog broke ground in this arena. Allowing for a little more time on the planet than Burkeman, Urban posited that we might have 90 years of life, so 4680 weeks rather than 4000.
One of his most famous posts, back in 2014, urged readers: visualize your life in years, your life in months, your life in weeks, your life in number of remaining SuperBowls…to appreciate what you do with your time.
For example, I’ve got got 2860 of my weeks behind me. It’s tempting to use these kinds of visualizations for dismay; certainly they can lead to existential angst and even more productivity dysmorphia. “See?” one might yelp! “I have even less time to make the widgets! To earn the money!” And yet, as we’ve seen over the last two weeks, that attitude just leads to focusing more on the quantifiable value you create for others; we want to look at quality, not quantity.
But, we can still turn to Urban for guidance. As a follow-up to his macro look at the finitude of life, he developed a way to organize and examine our lives at the micro level in 100 Blocks a Day.
Inspired by Urban, nomadic programmer Jama of Notion Backups, has identified a way to pause and reflect, giving perspective on where you are, chronologically speaking, in your day (rather than in your life). Rectangles.app gives you a quick glance at how much of today has gone by, in ten minute increments, as of the point in your day when you click the link. Click later in the day, more boxes turn green.
For example, when I visited and took this screenshot, I’d made it through 93 1/3 ten-minute blocks in my day.
When faced with how much of your day has passed and how much is left, you might have the following reactions:
- Yikes, I’d better get cracking! (A good motivation if you’ve been staring at social media or playing a video game for hours on end, for sure.)
- Yikes, I’ve been working and working, and I’ve only written 17 TPS reports and attended 5 hour-long meetings! (A likely sign of productivity dysmorphia creeping in around the edges.)
- Yikes, all I’ve done all day is work. I haven’t talked to anyone I love, I haven’t exercised or gotten any fresh air. I haven’t laughed. (And here’s where the magic might begin!)
If you’ve been experiencing signs of burnout due to toxic productivity, give this approach a try. Click on Rectangles and think about the day you’re having. Maybe even text the link to a friend, describe your day thus far, and get a reality check from someone who sees you more clearly.
Expanding from how much time is in a day (1440 minutes) to how much time is left in our lives, memento mori yields perspective. There are digital and analog options for helping you do just that.
ANALOG APPROACHES TO MEMENTO MORI
The Meditative Marble Method
Purchase a bag of colorful marbles and display them in an attractive glass jar. Create a ritual such that each day (or perhaps weekly, on Saturday or Sunday), you remove a marble from the jar and think about what you accomplished and gave your life meaning the last day (or week). This isn’t how many blog posts you wrote or how many new clients you signed on, but the intentional awareness of meaningful time spent with your partner, child, or friends, or special things you did to make your life a little more worthy of reflection.
Now, move the marble out of the jar to somewhere else (like an identical jar). If you planned to use this ritual weekly, you’d need to buy at least 52 marbles; daily, you’d want at least 366 (to cover leap year).
Perhaps carry that day’s marble around with you in your pocket to give you a visceral reminder all day that your time has precious value.
Perpetual Calendars
In my prior television career, I sent a lot of faxes, and that meant a lot of cover pages, and you always had a field to write the date. Unless you’re time traveling, it’s not 1997, so we’re not sending faxes much anymore. Instead, most of us check our phones or give a shout to Siri to see what the date is.
Just as digital time feels vague and unmoored from the rest of the hour, seeing just today’s date doesn’t give a sense of how today relates to the rest of the week or year.
Something more three-dimensional may help you be contemplative about the days as they pass.
See the MoMA Sliding Perpetual Calendar, designed by Giancarlo Cipri.
The Sliding Perpetual Calendar is made of plastic (so, not particularly environmentally sustainable) and measures 12 high x 9.2 wide x 0.3″ deep. You can mount it to the wall or prop it up on its included pegs. Each day, slide the red dots down the chutes-and-ladders (OK, just chutes) to select the day, month, and date. It’s currently available from MOMA for $48 ($43.20 for members).
Make the changing of the date into a device-free daily ritual and an opportunity to be mindful and intentional about the activities with which you fill your life.
Any perpetual calendar with moving pieces will work for this purpose. Other options:
Vosarea Perpetual Desk Calendar is wood, so it’s a bit better for the environment, and measures 12.8″ wide x 5.9″ high. (There’s no information on depth.) While it takes up horizontal real estate, the footprint is minimal. Amazon has it for $18.19 with a digital coupon.
ComiHome Perpetual Calendar Date Desk Calendar measures 10″ wide x 10″ high and has a sleek, modern look. This magnetometer calendar has a circular ring for the month and day of the week, a horizontal plane for displaying the date, and three magnets for selecting each, manually. It comes in red and black, or black and white and runs $22.99 at Amazon.
Deerine Wooden Block Perpetual Calendar is an upgrade the old-school block/cube calendar. It comes in pink, green, blue, black, and wood-grain, and runs $13.99 at Amazon. It measures 5.9” wide x 1.92” deep x 4” tall and is made of wood.
Journaling
It’s easy for days and then months to zip by without giving any thought to intentions beyond getting through the day. It’s like how the calendar pages flip and fly off in old black-and-white movies to let you know that significant time has passed. In old photo albums, you can gauge the passage of time by the change of hairstyles and clothing. But to percieve the changes (or lack thereof) in ourselves, a snapshot isn’t enough.
I’ll admit, I’m not skilled at journaling or adept at looking at my life as a big picture. I’m more of a to-do list person. I often write the blog posts I need to read, so I suspect that’s why I’ve been thinking about memento mori.
There are numerous apps for journaling, but I believe we’re more likely to put in emotional effort and pour out heartfelt thoughts on paper. I encourage you to try an analog journaling method if you are able. Something as simple as a One Line a Day journal for capturing the most vivid or uplifting aspects of life might be a good start.
Use Visual Time Trackers
Print or buy a copy of the grid squares from the Wait But Why post referenced above and track your life in weeks by shading the squares.
CONSIDER YOUR MORTALITY DIGITALLY
These apps are designed specifically to encourage memento mori.
Death Clock
The Death Clock app, available for iOS and Android, uses your answers to a questionnaire about your age, sex, lifestyle habits, and nation of residency to predict a death date. It’s not quite as grim as it sounds. Death Clock is AI-powered to help increase your longevity by helping users understand the impact of current habits on life expectancy and encourage making changes to live a longer, fuller life.
Their makers describe it: “It’s like having a personal grim reaper, but with health tips.” The app is free, but some features require a paid subscription.
Life: Just One
Life: Just One, created by Julien Lacroix for iOS, was inspired by the Wait But Why post. It’s designed to help users recognize that their time is precious and make the right decisions by allowing them visualize the approximate number of years, months, and days they have left on this earth.
Atypical for apps these days, it pushes no notifications, has no ads, and there’s no sign-up. It collects no life data. The basic app is free, though the Pro level unlocks widgets, a “life in weeks” section, and full customization.
WeCroak
WeCroak was inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying:
To be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times daily.
Each day, the WeCroak app sends five notifications to invite users to stop and contemplate death (and, by extension, the value of life).
Rather than coming at predictable times, the “invitations” arrive randomly and can arrive at any moment (“just like death,” their web site states). Upon receipt, users open the app to reveal a quote from a poet, philosopher, or notable thinker on the topic of death and may choose to pair contemplation with conscious breathing or meditation.
The WeCroak app is free to use on a variety of platforms including Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple Vision and Android.
Additionally, WeCroak has subscription-based Leap programs, providing challenges to help “face impermanence in all its aspects and live better lives today.”
Life Clock
Life Clock is a simple, platform-agnostic website. Enter your birthdate and time, and the result is a swiftly moving digital readout of your age to 12 post-decimal point places. Click the right arrow to get your age in months to ten decimal places; click again to get your age in months; click again for your age in days, hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds.
You can even see your age in lunations (lunar cycles), dog years, fortnights, galactic years, kilometer light traveled, Poincaré recurrence times (a theorem which theorizes that everything that’s happening now will happen again in exactly the same way!), heartbeats, your age in Friends or Game of Thrones marathons, and more! The data isn’t deep, but offers perspective.
Related apps include 0280, Mori Master, Life Left, and Memento Mori Stoic Reminder.
Ask AI Bots to Play Jeeves
Super-techie? Let AI remind you that life is short and precious:
- Schedule Telegram to deliver daily memento mori reminder messages or affirmations.
- Learn how to make a reminder bot on Discord with dotReminder.
- Contemplate life’s impermanence with Memento Mori GPT-Reflective AI Companion
- Use a service like Replika or create custom bots.
ORGANIZE AND ALIGN YOUR LIFE WITH YOUR VALUES
You know the story of the professor, the jar, the rocks and the sand, right?
Once you see your life racing by, you may be inclined to focus on the big rocks. In addition to applying all of the organizing and productivity lessons this blog shares weekly, try a strategic approach.
Audit Your Life
Identify what really matters to you. Sit quietly and write down your top 5 values: being more present in your children’s lives, leaving a professional, personal, or financial legacy, improving your health to live better longer, having more adventures, being creative, etc.
Look at your calendar and your bank account. Examine how you spend your three currencies: time, money, and attention.
Does your spending reflect your values? Are you giving time to your priorities or just whatever is loudest?
Look at how you spend your three currencies: time, money, and attention. Look at your calendar and bank account. Do they reflect your values? Share on XWrite a Personal Mission Statement
Channel your inner marketing director and figure out what you want your life legacies to be. Post your mission statement where you can see it.
Organize Your Life to Invest in Meaningful Experiences
What are your big rocks? If it’s time with loved ones, personal growth, and joy, do you have inviolable time for vacations, family dinners, or learning opportunities scheduled?
I’ve often referenced Laura Vanderkam’s book Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters. Her Rule 6 encouragesus to have identify one “big adventure” (lasting perhaps half a weekend day) and one “little adventure” (lasting an hour) each week to introduce novelty.
As Vanderkam has explained, “We don’t ask where did the time go when we remember where the time went.”
What’s keeping you from scheduling adventures?
For five years, I had so few “adventures,” I can count them on one hand, twice meeting up with Nashville colleague Sara Skillen for day trips and last summer’s 1900-mile round trip road trip to see Paper Mommy and go to my college reunion. My two-night adventure of going to see The Floating Men was transformative, reminding me what I want in my life.
Revisit Your Audit Periodically
Memento mori isn’t a one-and-done proposition. Build time into your day, your week, your month, and your annual review to put more life in your life.
Memento Vivere
Author Annie Dillard said, “How you spend your days is how you spend your life.”
Actress Kelly Bishop (A Chorus Line, Dirty Dancing, Gilmore Girls) wrote in The Third Gilmore Girl: A Memoir, “Don’t cry because you think your best days are gone. Smile because you had them in the first place.” So make sure you have them!
Memento mori (“Remember you must die”) has a sibling concept: Memento Vivere — Remember to live. Make every moment count: through mindfulness, gratitude, engagement, a sense of purpose, and celebration.
The lyrics to the song at the start of this post are a little salty for a “family” organizing blog, but I want to share my love of The Floating Men with Paper Doll readers. You can find their catalog on Spotify and Apple Music, and lots of (mostly ancient) concert video on their YouTube channel. And for the first time since 2009, they’ve got a digital EP, #Reoverimagined, with new (joyous) songs and fun bonuses, including:
Thank you, readers, for this extra-long indulgence, and thanks to Jeff, Scot, and The Floating Men for more than three decades of reminding me to (really) live!
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Jeff Holmes & Paper Doll (left); Scot Evans & Paper Doll (right) — Barrelhouse Ballroom, 1/18/25
Paper Doll Post:
A couple of thoughts hit first – I am past the average age of death for a woman so I must now be living on “borrowed time” and I have also heard the analogy using the rocks, pebbles, and sand with the added 2 cups of coffee.
The professor smiled. “I’m glad you picked up on that. No matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a cup of coffee with a friend.”
I enjoyed reading about why time passes more slowly for children.
In my own life as I am sure with everyone, I have felt times when time drug on and times when it just sped by. I am more conscious of how I use my time now and I really enjoyed your blog.
I’ve heard the same, but with beer instead of coffee. (I’ll have to create my own with ice cream, I guess!) But it’s too easy to see the big rocks as big efforts, but those adventures (no matter the size), can be powerful.
Thank you for reading and for your kind words, Jonda. I think you’re less on borrowed and more on BONUS time; you’ve moved to the bonus round because you did so well up until now! I know you’ll keep winning!
Julie, there’s too much for me to absorb in one sitting, but this stuff absolutely fascinates me, so thank you for compiling all this information!
I get it. I’m pretty sure this is the longest blog post I’ve ever written (by a few hundred words), it took twice as long to write, and I *still* took out over 1000 words. But I spend so much time on this blog talking about the moments and hours of managing one’s time (really, managing one’s efforts), but so little (on the blog, and in my own life), thinking about whether I’m doing what really will have mattered when the clock runs out.
I hope you’ll have time to absorb the bits you haven’t done yet. Thanks for reading!
I love The Meditative Marble Method. I like this one because no tech is involved. The physical nature of it reminds us to remember the value we give during the week or day. I would also add what I am grateful for to the marble method. =)
I can definitely see adding a gratitude ritual to any of these approaches (though I’m terrible at a gratitude practice, myself), and I prefer the analog approach because it’s soothing. You can incorporate it in your life (like flossing) at a time that makes sense rather than the more startling alerts of some of those apps. But we are each unique in our own ways, eh?
If only more women’s clothing had pockets, we could all walk around with our marble reminders close at hand!
Thank you for reading!
I feel like we are one day 87 of January for sure. It has been cold and dark. I can’t believe we are still in January. In contrast, July is a blink.
Here’s another calendar that we use at church. It is a circular calendar that tracks the year by the “seasons” we go through, and includes major holidays. One glance at this calendar helps you to see that most of the year is what we call “ordinary time.” Nothing particularly special going on. Life is like this. Lots of “same old, same old,” and then some special and exciting.
I don’t tend to think so much about how long I will live, or what I am accomplishing, in the long run. I do set goals, but generally they are nearer in and habit-based. I figure if I’m working on putting in place the daily life I believe is optimal, it will result in a life that I feel good about (long or short).
Not really feeling the need to live to be 90 LOL!
So glad you got out to that concert. I’ve had COVID at least twice (may more), so it doesn’t scare me anymore. Having moments that nourish and feed your soul like this are part of the joy of living, and we are so luck when we get them. 🙂
I just had a dental appointment, and the dental assistant laughed and laughed at the idea of January 87th and said, “I’m stealing that. This month is endless!”
“Ordinary time.” Ohhhh, I think I need to see this calendar, Seana!
The problem, I think, is that for a lot of us, we’re doing the things we do because we’re waiting for the life to happen where the important things can be done. I know my friends who don’t have kids feel the way I do; we’re still waiting to grow up, so we’re either working or meandering. And, as they say, nobody on their deathbed wished they’d spent more time at the office; the question is where should I spend more time?
Almost everyone in my family has lived to their mid-90s, and they were all born before so many advances in science, so I suspect I’ll be around long after 90. But with 30+ more years, that means more thinking about what I want my life to mean. (Hopefully it will mean more attending more of The Floating Men concerts!) Thanks for reading and for such a robust response!
I could almost feel the heat from your smiles with the Floating Men. You are a serious fan!
I agree with all the above comments. There is always time for coffee, beer or ice cream with a friend. I have been having coffee with a friend almost every week for over ten years. We started when his son died a few days before his college graduation in a fire. It is now therapeutic for both of us.
I am also on the downhill slide but I love the idea of recording a “good” event every day. The marble idea is terrific. I have three homemade marble tracks here for my grandsons (they always want something bigger and better). Therefore, I literally have thousands of marbles. I think I will put a jar on my dresser to have one in my pocket. 🙂
As always, love the links and approach although it is easier for you to say this isn’t as scary as it sounds!
Thank you for being you.
A 3+ decade fan from the very first album, so yes, I had lots of energy. It was a delight getting to see these folks again!
That’s such a sad story about your friend’s son, but I know it must give him immense comfort to be able to look forward to, and reflect back on, the times you spend together.
Record those good events! But how will you do it? A journal? (Probably not something online, eh?) And thousands of marbles? Let’s find some jars and you could have a whole new business!
Thanks for reading and for your kind words!
I’ve never heard of “memento mori,” but it makes sense. It reminds me of a conversation I had a long time ago with a life coach. She believed people are challenged to get rid of items because they fear death. It was an interesting conversation.
It’s commonly heard in the Catholic tradition (of which I am not a part), but it also runs as a thread through art and literature. It dates back to antiquity (like the Roman Stoics) but you’ll often see it on headstones in Europe, as part of the art from Mexican Day of the Dead festivals, etc. I bet you’ll see it often now that you’ve heard it here — that always happens to me when I hear a new term. 😉
Your life coach contact has an interesting theory. Perhaps people feel that without their things, their existence will not exist past their deaths, like a candle snuffed out? Intriging!
Thanks for reading!