I've been learning history by focusing on certain periods, and learning the most remarkable events that unfold. I look up "Ancient Egypt," watch documentaries and read some stuff.

I've realised that this strips me of a sense of time. As in I want to have a feel of how things changed as time passed. What exactly was going on in the rest of the world? How did X civilization pass on to Y civilization? How do I make connections between civilizations?

Any advice on how to manage that? Or could you suggest books that "satisfy?" that kind of feeling of being lost?

apologies if that was a tough read, i'm sleep deprived, questioning my awareness and i'm not sure whether i even exist at this point

Great questions, and I think I know the feeling. Have you tried any of the big-picture books by non-historians? That may sound like bad advice, but there might be an advantage to not being specialists in a single period--so writers like Jared Diamond (Germs, Guns, and Steel; Collapse), Charles Mann (1491 ;1493) have the freedom to make connections that give reasonable explanations for why things developed as they did. J.R. McNeil and William McNeil are historians who tried to make human history thematic in (The Human Web: A Bird's-eye View of Human History. A thought that occurs to me is that we are lost in history, in a sense, having little idea of what our own time is about or where we might be headed. So your feeling seems pretty understandable.

That is a great question.

An excellet question indeed. I experienced something similar when my daughter was in junior high school. I was born just before WW2, and in school I learned what I later discovered was Eurocentric history. Asia, African, the Americas were important only after European discovery, conquest, colonization, etc. While visiting my daughter's school at an open house, one stop was at her world history class. On the wall was a large chart that truly covered world history. If you wanted to know who was the Emperor of China while Tiberius was Emporer of Rome, it was right there. I cannot remember where she (the teacher) got this chart, but I will do some more looking; if I find a location, I will post it here.

Found what I was looking for. There is a web site called usefulcharts.com, which includes a series of history charts showing all major areas of the world (Americas, Africa, Europe, Middle East, Asia, Pacifa). Also on Utube you can see a video sowing highlights of this chart.