[majika]

To me, this sounds like a failure of your tooling rather than the code you're reading. Vim with Jedi, PyCharm and PyDev can all jump straight to definitions. What's your development environment?

I'll use `from <module> import <identifiers>` when the identifiers' names express their purpose, and aren't dependent on the module's name. Importing identifiers directly makes the code using them less noisy [0], and makes it possible to replace the source module for the identifiers later on. In Django projects, I'll often need to rename modules or move identifiers between modules, and so using `from` imports makes that a lot easier.

I agree that `as` imports should be used sparingly.

[0]: your suggested solution is even more noisy than using the qualified name, because now you have a variable hanging around and readers have to work out if `now` is going to be reassigned or used later.