Time

Within Puzzlebox, space is an elastic thing, full of folds, wormholes, pocket dimensions and other irregularities, and time is just as stretchy. Units of measurement are hard to pin down, and in many cases are completely meaningless. However, they're still useful in many circumstances.

Characters frequently make reference to "days", and some places within the Mess do have a standard day/night cycle. Often, however, "days" are measured relative to the character's own sleeping cycle.

Upwarp runs on Upwarp Standard Time (UST), which is as near to absolute time as their engineers can manage. In practice, seconds and hours must often be added or subtracted from the time scale to account for discrepancies, but these are kept to a minimum by the heroic work of the Department of Time Stabilization.

Strange has its own arcane and incomprehensible timekeeping system - used most notably by the Strangewarp Library. Users are advised to return their books promptly to avoid late penalties.

Some cultures within Top and Bottom have a calendar based on natural rhythms, though the former is seasonal and the latter more to do with fertility cycles. Chitin Queen calendars often include aspects of multi-year brood cycles.

Some units

Zoe suggested some time-units [here]:

These Units of time are rather 'slippery' rather than discrete units, as these are stories we are telling and not war games nor chess moves. And it's vaguely pretentious -:)

Notional/Notion/Not

A quick unit of time.
"Just give me a notional, dear, to finish up my tea."

Scenery/Skan/Scansion

The time it takes to finish doing what you're doing.
Charlie chased Zoe down through Up, taking almost a Skan.

Wheel/W

The 'longest' unit of time, this denotes sometime in the future that can be imagined, yet is hard to experience in the context of the muck.
"It is rumoured that someone spent several Wheels to try to understand Zoe, and did..."

On Measurement & Time: A Notion Measurement could be something that one being could touch. A Scene could be something that takes an effort to move to/use/etc. And a Wheel could be something that is so immense as to be pretty much beyond description.

Trilogee thought up one on her own.

Ticks are a short period of time in which nothing happens.

Tocks are a little longer, but something happens in them.

Rounds are many ticks.

Turns are many tocks.

A cycle is a sleep/awakening cycle.

Another unit of time: A Zeitgeist Period, or Zeit. An extended period of time, similar to an age, epoch or eon; the time it takes for a meme to become dominant in a sector of the mess. For instance, in Strange, it's currently the Zeit of the Strangevirus; in a previous Zeit, Strange may have been different: equally strange, but in a different manner. If a Zeta Sector faction takes control of Up away from [Up Prime]?, the Warp might enter another Zeit. On a smaller scale, if one of the subfactions of the Victorian Retrotech Collective achieves dominance, the faction might enter a new Zeit. And so on.

I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. -- [Danny Hillis]

Time, like water, flows downhill, and carries a lot of crap with it. - Echo