Sunday, October 1, marked the last day of the single week’s vacation Graphics Director Dykman took in 2006. It was also the only day that week that he checked his work email. Nation Editor Beyer had forwarded him an exchange that had transpired in his absence. He recalls:

Somebody had pointed out that the population of the US would hit 300 million sometime in mid-October, and then there was a bunch of back and forth about what we should do about it. Then somebody suggested… dredg[ing] up the old idea for the American Mirror project… The last message, the one that came to me, was: "Do you think you could do this project by October 20?"

Dykman was stunned. The suggested due date would leave him with a scant three weeks to complete the assignment, which struck him as “a crazy amount of time to bite off something like this.” He discerned that the project could become a cover story. Given the average length of Time ’s cover features, this meant he would have to fill perhaps a dozen pages. He also knew that he had to spend the week of October 2 working on that week’s issue of the magazine, giving him only two weeks to devote his entire attention to whatever “American Mirror” would become. The graphics department, furthermore, had never undertaken a project this big; Dykman had no template, no strategy, and virtually no guidance from any other department. “Nobody was conceiving this project or editing this thing,” Dykman recalls. “It was ‘let’s do that 300 million thing,’ and that was it.”

Dykman considered declining the assignment. On the other hand, Gibbs’ “American Mirror” concept was already two years old. Dykman had liked it, and had occasionally discussed it with Gibbs throughout 2005. This was Dykman’s first opportunity to get the project into the magazine. By Monday, Dykman had begun to see the population milestone as a “now-or-never-moment” for his graphics department. “I could… keep talking about it for the next 10 years or just do it,” Dykman says. He told Beyer that day he would do it.

The first week of October, Dykman started monitoring the Census Population Clock . The United States Census , in addition to collecting exhaustive information about features of the American population, also counted US residents. It calculated the population’s growth rate using data about births, deaths, and immigration. It displayed this information in the “US Population Clock,” a section of its website that kept a running tally of US residents. In October 2006, the Census estimated that there was a birth every seven seconds, a death every 13 seconds, and an international arrival every 31 seconds. ^[14] Taken in tandem, this meant the resident US population increased by one person every 11 seconds on average.

Noticing this growth rate, Dykman realized that his October 20 due date, while unsettlingly near, was also too late. By the Census’ estimate, the US population would reach 300 million nearly a week before he could get anything into the magazine.