As mentioned in my first blog post, I decided to write about the reason I created this blog. Read until the end, where I provide you with a tool to visualize your own life and get a grasp of how much time you still have left.
As is often the case, it all starts with a YouTube video
I often find myself watching random videos that YouTube suggests to me during the day. I am sure many of you relate to this. Sometimes I leave these videos on auto-play while I work on something else, other times I give them my full attention.
I was on a streak of TED talks and stumbled upon this talk by Tim Urban about being a procrastinator. I identify with his experience of procrastinating important things in life. Watch it if you’re interested:
At the end of the talk he shows us a Life Calendar: a visual representation of his life in weeks. It is simply a grid and each square represents a week of your life. This is a 90-year life calendar:
As Tim puts it:
“Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long. But this chart helps to emphasize that it’s most certainly finite. Those are your weeks and they’re all you’ve got.”
From Tim Urban’s Wait But Why blog post “Your Life in Weeks“
Click this button to read his original blog post, where he introduces the Life Calendar in detail and even sells a poster version of it for $20.
Your own FREE Life Calendar
If you are like me, this visual representation of your life interested you, but you did not like the idea of buying Tim’s $20 poster. This is where I come in for the rescue! As soon as I finished the video, I created a Google Spreadsheet to represent my life calendar.
I created a way to input dates and colors, and wrote a script to color the grid according to the dates. I made it horizontal so that it displays better on most monitors. This is what a simplified version of my Life Calendar looks like:
The dates and colors are specified in the second sheet. In this example, I outlined my professional life:
All you have to do to generate your own Life Calendar is follow these easy steps:
- Clone my spreadsheet by clicking the button below
- Go to the ‘Dates’ sheet and put in your own dates and colors
- Click the giant button “Generate Life Calendar”
That’s it! You can now visualize your own life at a glance.
I found that the best way to use this calendar is to input dates of related periods of your life, such as your professional journey (school, university, jobs) or your love journey (met your soul mate, started dating, got married), or even your journey of moving through this world. Another tip is not to fill the list with too many dates, as some of the meaning might get lost in all those colors.
My hope is that this easy visualization of my life will aid me in living a more meaningful and productive life. It already motivated me to create this blog, so that’s a good start, I guess.
If you have any questions about the spreadsheet or just want to share something, feel free to leave a comment below. If you can do a bit of coding, you are also free to build upon this spreadsheet’s script and add more functionality as you see fit. Just click on Tools>’Script editor’ to access the script.
Here is to more productive weeks!