Markwhen and Meridiem are great

Markwhen is a tremendously underrated piece of software. It's a good syntax for creating timelines with a great interactive UI bolted onto it. What mermaid did for charts, markwhen does for timelines. Plus you can use it as a calendar if you want.

The markwhen editor I use is Meridiem, which you can also download as a desktop app and it'll edit text files on your computer. The editor is pretty amazing. It syncs what you click on in the timeline to where it is defined in the text document.

The syntax is really good: it supports a bunch of date formats, shorthands like just writing 2009-2012, relative dates, like writing 5 years and that automatically coming 5 years after the last event.

Understanding time is one of my biggest cognitive challenges. It has always been hard: keeping the months in order, remembering how long something has been happening, remembering what happened first. There might be a name for this inability to conceive of time intuitively: whatever it is, I have that. So I rely heavily on calendars and tools. Every event and birthday is in Fantastical for me.

But I didn't have a tool for seeing longer-term events until Markwhen. Now I can look at things like where I've lived, my career trajectory, vesting, QSBS timelines, vacation planning, and more, all on in a single interface. It's been a huge boost.