Accurate timing over the sub-second scale is essential for a range of human perceptual and motor activities, but the mechanisms for encoding this time scale remain poorly understood. Recent work suggests that timing does not involve a centralised clock, but patterning within a local distributed neural network. We will present and discuss recent experiments and models of duration estimation in conditions of adaptation and masking, and during saccades. All these factors can dramatically influence time perception. Time is compressed and even inverted during saccadic eye-movements. Masking and adaptation also affect apparent duration in a spatially localised manner (Johnston et al., Curr Biol, 2006). More recent experiments show that if gaze is shifted between adaptation and test periods, the effects of adaptation on temporal duration are both retinotopic and also spatiotopic. This result sits nicely with Janssen and Shadlens (Nat Neurosc, 2005) evidence that neurones in parietal cortex, whose receptive fields shift around the time of saccades, are instrumental in coding sub-second intervals.