We’ve talked before about visualizing the hours in your day to understand how you’re spending your time (and make sure you’re spending each hour right). But what if you could do the same activity on a larger scale to understand where your life is going (and make sure you’re spending that right, too)?
Now, you can.
Tim Urban over at Wait But Why has created a graphic breaking a 90-year-old life up into weeks denoted by little check boxes. On his site, he’s annotated a few of them—for example, showing the life of a typical American—and also provided a blank copy to use as you wish.
So, what could you do with this chart? Well, as Urban suggests, you could use it to visualize major events and phases of your life, to plot progress toward a goal, or to note your feelings about each week as they pass. You could also use it to do some career planning and keep an eye on your progress, write down what you want to focus on each week, or even track how you’re feeling about your job to make it easy to notice when you’ve been unhappy there for far too long.
No matter how you decide to use it, it’s pretty jarring to see exactly how much time you have at your disposal in your life—and pretty empowering to realize that time is yours to fill as you wish.
Now, go make this week count.