An electronic pen capable of recording position data representative of its movement runs a time handling method. In this method, a counter is operated to sequentially generate a monotonous sequence of counter values. Further, a time calculator is operated to generate a current time value. Also, a control device is operated to derive a current counter value from the counter and the current time value from the time calculator, and to associate at least a subset of the position data with the current counter value and the current time value. If each subset defines a pen stroke, counter values may represent the order in which pen strokes were created. The pen may allow an external device to arbitrarily adjust the time calculator, e.g. to reflect a local time, since the resulting time values need not be used to determine the mutual order of the pen strokes.