My life in weeks

Have you ever been curious about how your life might look if you broke into weeks? I was. Here's what I came up with.

Published by Bryan McDowall on May 27th, 2021.

The latest Kurzgesagt video talks about the concept of a human lifespan broken into week-long blocks, over a period of 90 years.

What Are You Doing With Your Life? The Tail End

It’s a little spooky because the same morning, before this video was published, I actually made a calendar breaking my own life into weeks.

This in itself was inspired by a Reddit thread, in which u/lucagez posted an image generator for Notion, which takes into account your date of birth, and weeks-to-date. I had known of Tim Urban’s Your Life in Weeks calendar for some time, but this tempted me in to creating my own. And I added a little more detail.

What am I looking at?

It looks a little like a defragmented disk image.

The first area (everything before the black squares) covers my time from birth until graduating university. The pink area is my youth - which I'll be honest, I mostly don't remember. Immediately following are primary school, high school, college and university.

The black area was a somewhat chaotic time post-univeristy where I was working a bunch of different part time jobs, and living between Glasgow and Fife.

The grey section marks the beginning of my professional employment, with the large blue section being my time at Rockstar North, and the green and red squares here representing the release of Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 respectively. The final orange section marks my latest adventure, as product designer at Dayshape.

I'll likely re-vist this and add more milestones - vacations, achievements and so on.

Why do this?

Being able to block out and measure periods of my life is pretty interesting to me, as someone who is fairy introspective.

From a realistic, though slightly morbid point, it puts mortality into perspective. Given that this diagram represents 90 years in total, and the average life expectancy of a Scottish Male being 77.1 years old¹, though who knows what might happen before then?

More importantly, looking at my life so far using this method is helping me value what time I might have left; to do the things that I want to. To avoid putting things off, potentially indefinitely.

Anyhow, I think it's neat, and a bit fun. If you found it interesting, please check out Tim Urban's original blog post for more background info.