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Time Anchor

Other

Offload date math to code — get current date, days/weeks until goal dates, and month-end info. Use whenever you need to reason about relative dates or calculate "how many days until [event]." Especially important when comparing milestone timelines against today's date. Triggers on any message mentioning dates, deadlines, timeframes, "when," "days until," planning, scheduling, or temporal reasoning.

Install

openclaw skills install @elroyic/time-anchor

Time Anchor

Use exec to run the bundled script instead of doing date math yourself. The script returns deterministic results — no guessing.

Quick Usage

python3 ~/.openclaw/workspace/skills/time-anchor/scripts/time-anchor.py [--today | --until DATE | --weekday DAY | --month]
# No flags = full anchor: today + all configured goals + month info
FlagOutput
(none)Full anchor: today, day of week, all goals in days/weeks, month info
--todayToday's date and day of week only
--until YYYY-MM-DDDays to a specific arbitrary date
--weekday TuesdayUpcoming occurrences + JSON with ambiguity flag

For weekday labels, 0-7 days away maps to this / this_week; 8+ days away maps to next / next_week. | --month | Days left in current month (excluding today) |

Workflow Rules — Don't Guess

1. Named event → targets first, then memory/context, then web search, THEN ask.

User says "how far is Devconf?" → run full anchor to check if it's a configured goal. If not: check conversation history / memory for the date we discussed. Still unsure? Web search. STILL unsure? Ask which occurrence they mean.

2. Weekday references → default to NEXT upcoming occurrence (forward looking).

Today is Wednesday, user says "how far until Tuesday?" → use --weekday Tuesday, report the next one forward (6 days away). Never default to a past occurrence unless explicitly asked about something in the past.

3. Only return PAST occurrences on explicit past-tense phrasing:

  • "How far away was last Tuesday?" → look backward, report most recent
  • "How long has it been since summer started?" → calculate days since fixed date
  • Any phrase with "since," "ago," "last" followed by weekday → backward lookup

4. Ambiguity: --weekday flags it, agent must ask.

When JSON output contains "ambiguous": true:

  • Do NOT pick one. The tool is telling you there's a "this week" vs "next week" ambiguity.
  • Ask the user to clarify which occurrence they mean.
  • Short fuzzy weekday inputs should be at least 3 characters; if the prefix is still ambiguous, clarify rather than guessing.

Adding Goals

Edit ~/.openclaw/workspace/skills/time-anchor/scripts/time-anchor.py, add to the TARGETS dict:

TARGETS = {
    "2026-10-15": "Event name here",  # YYYY-MM-DD: descriptive label
}

Full documentation

See README.md for installation, ambiguity examples, and more.