About The Present
A clock for the scale of the year
The Present is an annual wall clock designed to reveal a scale of time most of us never get to see: the year.
It does this effortlessly. One hand completes one full revolution every 365 days, turning the passing year into a single, continuous cycle.
The result is not a new schedule, system, or habit.
It’s a new frame of reference.
Why it exists
Modern life gives us constant reference for the day. Hours. Minutes. Alerts. Deadlines. But it offers almost no way to see the larger arc those moments belong to: the year.
Without that context, everything can start to feel equally urgent. Days blur together. Seasons lose their character. Time feels compressed instead of spacious.
The Present restores that missing context by making the year visible.
What it changes
When the year is visible, the present moment regains proportion.
People who live with The Present often describe a subtle but persistent shift: less hurry, clearer seasons, having a 'friend' in time, and a wider horizon of their lives.
Not because time slows down, but because it finally has somewhere to unfold.
How it works
The Present is a silent, battery-powered wall clock with no apps, updates, or notifications to distract you.
Its single hand moves continuously, sweeping through one revolution a year, mirroring Earth's orbit around the sun.
It doesn’t tell you what to do.
It doesn’t demand attention.
It simply shows your place in the year, beyond the seconds, minutes, and hours of conventional timekeeping.
A note on time scales
In biology, daily rhythms are often called circadian.
Yearly rhythms are called circannual.
We are deeply attuned to both, but modern tools overwhelmingly emphasize the day while leaving the year abstract.
The Present is designed to make that longer rhythm legible again.
The Global Present
Since 2012, Scott Thrift has crafted, packaged, and delivered over 10,000 timepieces to owners in these forty-four countries.
Designed to last
A tool as valuable as The Present, must operate continuously for a long, long time. Each piece is designed from the ground up for longevity, and assembled carefully in Burlington, Vermont.
Every unit is soldered, programmed, tested, and assembled by hand. It uses a custom low-power movement engineered for continuous, decades-long operation.
This is not a disposable object. It’s a long-term reference point for the flow of the year as a whole.
A quiet invitation
The Present is not about escaping modern life.
It’s about adding back a scale of time that modern life rarely shows, so the days we live inside it can make more sense.
When you can see the year as a whole, the present moment has room to breathe.
Meet Scott Thrift, the person who makes each timepiece.
Ssong Yang and Scott Thrift with their daughter on her first birthday, Spring 2025.
About Scott Thrift
Scott Thrift (b. 1979, Winston Salem, NC) is a media artist and designer who explores how we perceive and experience time.
For over a decade, he worked in the rhythm of cuts and storytelling as a filmmaker and co-founder of the multi-award-winning production company m ss ng p eces.
Scott Thrift dancing on the bottom of the world in Antarctica, Winter 2012.
His work took him to six continents, documenting design processes and telling stories about the shifting nature of human experience.
Crafting films: bending, stretching, and compressing time, gave him an intimate relationship with the meaning of a moment.
But it also revealed a hidden truth about time: the way we measure the moment may limit our capacity to experience it.
Scott Thrift in Miami Beach, Summer 2008.
In 2012, Thrift founded The Present to give the moment context.
The result is a long-lasting, kinetic sculpture that reveals the nature of time our industrial clocks leave out: the continuity and embodied wisdom of life’s circannual rhythm.
Scott Thrift with his daughter, Fall 2024.
