An occasion is a stretch of days — a trip, a wedding weekend, a week at the lake — that frames the connections during it. It never counts as time connected; the connections inside it do.

Some time together does not fit in a single connection. A long weekend with your cousins is a dozen meals, walks and late nights — and logging the whole weekend as one connection would count seventy hours as "time connected", which is not what happened.

An occasion is the frame for that. It holds a span of days, who was on it, and the connections that happened during it. The occasion itself never counts toward anyone's hours or cadence; the connections inside it do, one by one.

Making an occasion

Open Connections from the menu — it appears once you have logged your first connection — and choose to make a new occasion. Fill in:

a title — "Long weekend in Maine";
when it starts and ends — the first and last day. A one-day occasion is fine;
a timezone — where the occasion happens. It starts as your device's timezone; set it to the local one for a trip abroad. It places the occasion's days on your timeline and decides which notes on a person's page sit inside the occasion in their history. Whether a connection falls on its days goes by the connection's own date, where it happened. See Timezones;
a location — optional;
who was on it — optional. Longtime uses who was there to suggest which connections belong in it. Leave yourself off: you are on every connection, so listing yourself makes every connection on those days a suggestion.

Occasions are made here, not in the interview.

A calendar you bring into Longtime can also propose occasions: an all-day or multi-day event with someone else on it arrives as an occasion suggestion rather than a connection. See Constant Bridges.

What belongs in it

You choose. Longtime suggests; nothing joins an occasion until you add it.

On the occasion's page, the suggested list shows connections on its days with someone who was on it — or, if you have not said who was on it, every connection on its days. Add the ones that belong. Showing the other connections on those days reveals the rest, in case the list of who was there is incomplete. The × on a connection in the occasion takes it out again; the connection itself is untouched.

A connection in an occasion is on its days

An occasion holds only connections that fall on its days. If a change to the occasion's dates, or to a connection's, would break that, Longtime asks you to take the connection out of the occasion first.

In the Connections list, an occasion is drawn as a frame around its connections, in date order with everything else.

An occasion's page

At the top: the title, and how many connections over how many days. The summary shows when it was, how many days, where and who was on it.

Connections — the ones in it, and the suggested ones.
People — who was on it. Editing the people changes the list; the × removes one person from the occasion without changing anything else about them.
History — notes about the occasion.

Editing the occasion changes its title, days, timezone, location and people.

From the occasion's ⋮ menu you can also convert it to a connection, for an occasion that turns out to be a single get-together. A connection's ⋮ menu does the reverse.

When a calendar cancels one

If an occasion came from a calendar and the hold is later canceled there, its page shows "The calendar took this hold back", and offers to remove the occasion, snooze the question, or keep it. Removing it removes its notes; the connections in it stay. Nothing is removed unless you choose to.

Deleting an occasion

Deleting it from the occasion's ⋮ menu permanently deletes the occasion and its notes. The connections in it stay — they just are not part of it any more.

Details

In the Connections list, when a connection that is not part of an occasion falls on its days, the frame splits around it, and the part after it is marked "continued". Inside a frame always means part of it.

Occasions can overlap and nest. A wedding weekend inside a week-long trip shows as a smaller frame inside the larger one, and a connection can be part of both. When an occasion sits inside a bigger one, or holds smaller ones, a line on its page links to each.

The toggle at the top of Connections shows everything, only occasions or no occasions. An occasion with nothing in it yet still shows, as an empty frame.

On a person's page, an occasion appears in their history when they were on it or when it holds a connection with them. Notes you wrote during it appear inside the frame.

Converting an occasion to a connection turns it into one connection on its first day. Choose its type, a start time and, if you like, an end time. Its people and history come along; the connections that were in it stay, they just are not part of it any more. Converting a connection to an occasion works over the same days.