Short Answer

The Present is a silent, battery-powered annual clock that completes one full revolution every 365.24 days, revealing the year as a single, continuous cycle.

Long Answer

The Present is an annual wall clock designed to show time at the scale of the year.

Instead of dividing life into seconds and minutes, it displays the entire year as one continuous circle. With a single glance, you can sense where you are in the arc of the year, early or late, opening or closing.

It’s not a gadget or a smart device. There are no alerts, apps, or settings. It’s a handcrafted, long-lasting time instrument made in Vermont, built to quietly restore context to the present moment.

Extended Answer

The Present is a time instrument designed to change how time is perceived, not how it is managed.

At its core, it’s simple: a circular face and a single hand that makes one complete revolution every 365.24 days, the same period as Earth’s orbit around the sun.

Each position on the dial corresponds to a real point in the year, including solstices, equinoxes, and the seasonal transitions between them.

Most clocks answer the question, “What time is it?”

The Present asks a different one: “Where are we in time?”

By making the year visible, moments regain proportion. Days feel less interchangeable. Seasons recover their character. Urgency no longer flattens everything into the same weight.

The Present does not notify, optimize, or instruct. It doesn’t tell you what to do next. It simply shows where you are.

People live with The Present in different ways:

• As a quiet reference in a living room or studio
  
• Near a desk, to keep ambition in proportion
  
• As a shared object that invites reflection and conversation
  

Across these uses, the common experience is the same: a shift from fragmented, industrial time to a continuous, cyclical sense of time.

The Present doesn’t tell you when to arrive.

It reminds you that you’re already here, in context.

Short answer

The Present is engineered to run for decades on the included lithium batteries.

Longer answer

The movement inside The Present is extraordinarily efficient.

On paper, its power consumption is low enough that it could run for centuries on the two lithium AA batteries it ships with. In the real world, battery chemistry and environmental factors introduce uncertainty, so we make a simpler and more honest claim:

For most owners, the batteries will never need to be changed.

Here’s why.

Unlike most modern devices, The Present uses almost no power. There is no screen, no wireless radio, no continuous processing.

• The microcontroller is asleep nearly all the time, drawing less than a microamp.
  
• It wakes only briefly to advance the hand, then returns to silence.
  
• Over the course of a year, the total energy used is extremely small.
  

At this scale, the limiting factor is not power consumption but battery aging.

The clock ships with Energizer L91 lithium AA batteries, chosen specifically for their exceptionally low self-discharge and long-term stability. These batteries lose capacity slowly simply by existing, even when unused. That natural aging happens faster than the clock consumes energy.

In other words, the batteries will age out long before the movement drains them.

When modeled conservatively—underestimating battery capacity and overestimating power draw—the system still lands in the range of multiple human lifetimes.

That’s why we don’t advertise a specific number of years.

Temperatures vary. Environments differ. Life happens.

What matters is this:

The Present is not something you maintain. It’s something you live with.

If nothing interferes, it will continue tracing the year quietly for decades, without intervention.

You usually don’t.

The Present is set in the studio during assembly and arrives already running. All you need to do is mount it securely using the included hardware.

If you ever need to adjust the hand position, you can do so using the manual blue dial behind the magnetized backplate.

That’s it. No pairing, syncing, or setup.

Functionally, there is no difference between the two.

The Present - Matte
The $360 edition simply does not have the custom glass and steel rims.

The Present
The $500 edition simply has custom glass and steel.

The pair is meant to satisfy distinct tastes. Some prefer no glass, some prefer glass. I wanted to provide for both.

No. Hours are not shown.

The Present is designed for a different scale of time.

Most of us already have abundant reference for the hour, minute, and second. Phones, computers, watches, and schedules provide that information constantly.

The Present reveals what those tools do not: where you are in the year.

It doesn’t replace conventional clocks.

It complements them by providing context they leave out.

Short Answer

A custom movement advances the hand in tiny steps so it completes exactly one revolution per year.

Long Answer

Inside The Present is an ultra-low-power mechanism built for one job: to move a single hand through one full circle over 365.24 days. A temperature-compensated timekeeping chip keeps accurate time. At precise intervals, the system wakes briefly, advances the hand by 1/3600th of a revolution, then goes back to sleep. You don’t see it move, and you don’t hear it—yet the year continues to turn.

Longer Answer

The Present combines proven clockmaking with purpose-built electronics—quietly, reliably, with as few points of failure as possible.

Here’s what’s happening inside:

• A modified German UTS gearbox provides the mechanical backbone. The gearing is configured so the hand needs 3,600 micro-advances to complete a full circle.
  
• A temperature-compensated real-time clock (RTC) keeps steady time across seasonal temperature changes. (That matters on a one-year timescale.)
  
• A microcontroller spends nearly all of its life in deep sleep, drawing almost no power.
  
• At programmed intervals, the RTC triggers a wake event: the controller briefly energizes the motor, advances the hand one step, and returns to sleep.
  

Each step is so small—1/3600th of a revolution—that you never watch it “tick.” You only notice that the hand is somewhere else than it was last week, last month, last season.

There’s no Wi-Fi, no syncing, no updates, no screens. The movement is designed to do one thing well:

trace the year—quietly—so the present moment has context.

Short Answer

Under normal indoor conditions, no—you should not need to change the batteries in your lifetime.

Long Answer

The Present ships with two lithium AA batteries already installed. The movement draws so little power—and lithium cells age so slowly—that the realistic expectation is: install it once, and leave it alone.

Our conservative design target is at least 100 years of operation on the original pair. If you check in 2060, you’ll likely find it still running.

Longer Answer

In most products, “never change the batteries” would be a reckless promise. Devices are power-hungry, and alkaline cells often leak long before they’re “empty.” The Present is built around the opposite assumption: maximize lifespan, minimize draw.

1. 
   Ultra-low power draw
   
   Most of the time, the electronics are asleep. A clock chip keeps time, the microcontroller wakes briefly, advances the hand, and everything goes quiet again. That “mostly asleep” behavior is what makes decades possible.
   
2. 
   Lithium instead of alkaline
   
   We use Energizer L91 lithium AA cells because they hold charge far longer than typical alkalines and are dramatically less prone to leaking over long spans.
   
3. 
   The math vs. the message
   
   If you run idealized calculations, you can get numbers that sound absurd. Real life isn’t idealized—temperature swings, storage conditions, and the simple passage of decades introduce uncertainty. So we make a grounded claim we’re comfortable standing behind:
   

The Present is engineered to run for a century on the batteries it ships with.

Could you replace them someday? Yes—standard AA size, accessible compartment.

But the honest expectation is: you won’t need to.

Short answer

If it ever stops under normal use, we’ll repair or replace the movement. You just cover shipping.

Long answer

The Present comes with a limited lifetime warranty on the movement.

If it stops for any reason other than obvious damage, you can send it back to Burlington, Vermont. We’ll repair or replace the mechanism so it runs as intended. You pay for shipping; we cover the work.

Longer answer

There are two different situations hidden inside the question “What happens if it stops?” We handle them differently.

1. Internal failures (what we stand behind)

If, at any point, The Present simply stops under normal use:

• The hand no longer advances over time
  
• There’s no visible sign of impact or damage
  

Then, as far as we’re concerned, something inside didn’t live up to its design.

In that case:

• You email us
  
• You ship the clock back to Burlington, Vermont
  
• We repair or replace the movement at no cost beyond shipping
  

We’ve been making versions of The Present since 2012, and we intend to support these instruments for the long haul. Longevity is not a marketing claim here. It’s the point of the design.

2. External damage (what we can often fix, but can’t cover)

Some situations fall outside the warranty:

• The clock is dropped or knocked off the wall
  
• It’s exposed to extreme conditions (heavy dust, soaking humidity, direct water)
  
• It’s damaged in a fire, flood, or similar event
  
• It’s deliberately disassembled or modified
  

In many of these cases, the movement itself may still be fine, but the body or hand has been compromised.

When that happens:

• We can often refurbish the clock at cost, replacing or rebalancing parts as needed
  
• If the damage is extensive, we’ll help you replace it with a new timepiece
  

These scenarios aren’t covered under the free repair promise because they’re outside what any mechanism can reasonably be built to survive. But we do care about keeping these objects in circulation, and we’ll always try to help.

The simple version

If it stops and you didn’t abuse it, we fix it.

If life happens and it’s damaged, we’ll help you repair it or start again.

We prioritize existing owners, because The Present is meant to last and to stay with you.

An annual clock is a timepiece whose primary “time unit” is the year.

Instead of a hand circling the dial every 12 hours, an annual clock’s hand moves so slowly that it completes one full revolution in about 365 days. The position of the hand corresponds to where you are in the cycle of the year; early, mid, late; opening, unfolding, closing.

It doesn’t replace ordinary clocks or calendars. It adds something they don’t show: the year as a continuous whole, so each day has context.

Most of us have an intimate sense of the day.

We can feel an hour. We can feel a minute. We can feel the pressure of “right now.”

But the year, the larger arc that gives those days their meaning, rarely has a shared, visible reference. It exists as dates on a grid, or as a vague feeling in the background.

And yet, the year is not vague to the body.

Across biology, many systems change with the seasons: sleep, mood, immune activity, and appetite shift. Light lengthens and shortens—temperature changes.

The world changes.
We change with it.

The problem isn’t that modern life uses clocks. It’s that modern life trains us to live within a narrow band of time: the next hour, the next meeting, the next deadline, while leaving the year abstract.

It’s like listening to a metronome instead of hearing the song.

A metronome is helpful. But if it becomes the only thing you hear, you start mistaking tempo for music.

An annual clock is a different kind of instrument. It doesn’t replace your calendar or watch. It adds something they can’t: a continuous visual reference for the year as a whole, so the days inside it regain context.

When you can see the year, the present moment stops floating in isolation. A week feels like part of a season. A season feels like part of a cycle. Urgency has somewhere to go.

So why would anyone want an annual clock?

Well, if you want to live with more context: less hurry, clearer seasons, and a broader sense of where you are in time, an annual clock gives you a simple, quiet way to keep the whole year in view.

Yes.

They describe the same idea at different scales.

Circadian rhythms track the 24-hour day–night cycle, while circannual rhythms track the roughly 365-day cycle of the year.

Humans are biologically attuned to both, but most modern tools only make the daily rhythm visible.

The Present exists to make the circannual rhythm legible in the same intuitive way we understand the day.

You are correct.

For the sake of simplicity, I have moved Day and Moon into special order requests.

Email hello @ thepresent dot is with your preference and we will get back to you as soon as we can.