Create a map of your life where each week is a little box.
“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.”
In 2014, blogger Tim Urban, published a post called “Your Life in Weeks,”
where he showed a visualization of life as a series of little squares,
with each one representing a week.
It’s a powerful, concise way to visualize an entire human life.
This site helps you create one of those visualizations for yourself.
You can use it to track key periods and events in your life,
see the progress you’ve made over time,
and easily share your life story with friends and loved ones.
I built this app after seeing Gina Tripani’s interpretation of the idea,
and realizing I wanted one for myself.
And then I thought, well, if I want one maybe other people do too.
Check out
8 Comments
czue
After I saw Gina Trapani's "Life in Weeks" last week I got the idea that letting anyone make one would be a cool product. I've been working on this off and on for the last week, and have gotten it good enough where I'm ready to get feedback. You can add "Periods" (colors) as well as "Events" to your timeline. You can also record longer details that show up on hover, automatically add world events, and export/import the entire thing to a file.
Happy to answer any questions about the app or build any feature requests in near-real time!
c_biddlecombe
This is awesome. Can I embed this on my website?
pcthrowaway
This is very, very, cool. But I am a little worried it's also a social engineer's wet dream.
It'd be great to put everyone's birthday as January 1 of the year they were born by default, and scrub things such as:
* City names other than (maybe) the city they currently live in
* Proper names e.g. first partners, spouses, pets (I have no idea how you'd do this though, other than warning users if one of the top 1000 names are detected in their explanatory text or something)
* Names of vehicles
Honestly with how varied security questions can be these days I hesitate to suggest there's even a "safe" list of personal facts which can be publicly displayed. Obviously whatever you might put on LinkedIn or a resume is fair game, but anything beyond that may really open you up to attacks.
caitlinface
I really love that you can play around without creating an account. Kudos!
rishikeshs
Loved it! Is the code publicly available? When I built mine[1], I did the mistake of keeping each row as 26 weeks and 2 rows roughly as one year of life. This causes some rounding errors!
Loved this design as its responsive.
Question: The wider cells, do they represent one week and its simply wide just to fit in the text?
[1] https://rishikeshs.com/timeline/
ks2048
Nice Job! Editing "World Events" would be nice – perhaps just click on it to give option to delete. "SpaceX Landing" has nothing to do with my life.
bonoboTP
It would be nice to have a choice of icons to select when adding an event. (Currently you have to insert an emoji, which is not so simple on desktop.)
mikesabat
I'm sure it's on your list, but I think it would be helpful if I could click into the timeline in order to add an event/period of my life. I think there could be a really cool interface expanding years and drilling into certain time periods.
Also, as I get older I remember events, but I'm not sure when they happened. I remember being in a certain city on St. Patty's Day, but can't remember what year that might have been.
I got a little obsessed with this idea of journaling my life during the pandemic. I would record videos for my kids to watch in 20+ years. I figure they'll get a kick out of seeing their dad young and talking about current events. I built a site and made my parents record stories about their life – viography.co (try it free functionality is currently being rebuilt and not working. If you want a code dm me).
For the life in weeks, I think the more information that can be saved makes it more valuable. Personally I'm playing around with the idea of turning my site into a weekly video journal. It seems like everyone is putting a ton of content online, it's mostly ephemeral and clickbait-y and as we all get older we'll wish we made more substantial recordings of ourselves and our situations.