I guess I've made this point before, but it bears repeating;
The only problem with understanding time is that we see it in reverse. As mobile organisms, we have a sequential thought process, in order to navigate. Then after a few hundreds of thousands of years narrating our journeys to one another and building civilizations out of the collective knowledge, this past to future sequencing seems pretty fundamental, but the reality is that change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. The earth turning is cause to the effect of tomorrow becoming yesterday.
Duration is this present state, as events come and go. It's the face of the clock going counterclockwise.
Different clocks can run at different rates for the simple reason that they are separate actions. Think metabolism, or frequencies.
Time is asymmetric because what is measured, action, is inertial. The earth turns one direction, not both. The relative order of the system is irrelevant.
There can't be a physical dimension of time, because of the 1st law of thermodynamics, the conservation of energy. Meaning it is always and only present. The past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it, aka, causality.
The present is not a dimensionless point between past and future, but the configuration of this energy. Its changing form is what creates time.
As an effect of this energy, time is like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but no one calls them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our bodily and environmental functions, not the processing of thought.
While energy goes from one form to the next, past to future, these forms come and go, future to past. Process versus pattern.
With factories, the pattern/product goes from start to finish, while the process/production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. As with life, as the individual goes birth to death, while the species goes onto the next generation, shedding the old. Consciousness goes one thought to the next, as thoughts come and go. It is a feedback loop, as the patterns affect the direction of the process.
As biological organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with the central nervous system distilling and sorting the patterns directing our journeys. Patterns steering the motor of the process.
For the cognoscenti though, it's all about the patterns, not the process. The head, not the heart and gut.