Using the minor arcana for timing - does it actually work?

ok so i've been reading maybe 15 years and the one thing i still go back and forth on is using the minors for timing. you know the system, wands for days, swords weeks, cups months, pentacles seasons or years. in theory it's tidy. in practice i've had it land dead on and i've had it miss by a mile. the time i pulled Eight of Wands for 'when will the offer come' and the call came three days later, sure, believer. but then Three of Pentacles for a house sale that took almost a year. so i don't know if it's a real mechanic or if i only remember the hits. how do you all actually use it, if at all? do you lean on the suit, the number, or just the feeling of the card?

this is such a good honest question and i love that you included the misses, most people only post the hits. my own take after a lot of years is that the suit-to-time system is more of a texture than a stopwatch. wands move fast and hot, pentacles move slow and solid, that part i trust. the exact day or month, less so. what's helped me is to read timing as pace rather than date. Eight of Wands isn't saying tuesday, it's saying this one arrives quickly once it moves. Three of Pentacles isn't a year, it's a thing built in stages with other people involved, which just happens to take longer. when i stopped demanding a calendar from the cards and started asking about speed, the readings got a lot more useful and a lot less disappointing

building on hollowmoon, because i think that pace framing is exactly right. the Golden Dawn attributions people quote for timing were never really meant as a literal clock, they came out of the astrological decans, so a 'month' is more a symbolic span than thirty days. what i teach beginners is to use the minors for timing only when the whole spread is already about timing, and to let a strong Major override the whole thing, because the Majors sit outside that little calendar entirely. so if you pull the Wheel next to your Eight of Wands, i'd stop counting days and read it as 'when the moment turns.' and honestly, keeping a dated journal of your timing pulls is the only way to learn whether the system works for your deck and your hands. mine is accurate about half the time, which is useful and humbling in equal measure