Background
Back in 2014, Tim Urban wrote a post on Wait But Why called Your Life in Weeks. The idea is simple: take a long human life of 90 years and draw every week of it as a small box, one row of 52 boxes per year. The whole thing fits on a single page.
It’s a strange thing to look at. A lifetime usually feels too big to picture, but laid out like that it becomes something you can see all at once, and even count. And once you know where your birthday falls, you can see exactly how much of the page is already filled in.
Ever since I read it, I wanted a version of that chart for my own life: one that knew my birthdate, shaded in the weeks I’d already lived, and let me mark the big chapters on it. I started building it a few years ago, but I didn’t know JavaScript very well and it never got past a rough first draft. It’s finally finished.
Why “4680”?
90 years × 52 weeks = 4,680 weeks. That’s the whole grid, and the name of the project.
How to use it
Head to harnasch.com/4680.
1. Set your birthdate
Pick your birthdate and click set. The grid fills in:
- Grey squares are weeks you’ve already lived.
- The dark square is the current week.
- White squares are the weeks still ahead (assuming 90 years).
Each row is one year of your life, numbered 1 to 90 down the right side. Below the event list you’ll see your stats: weeks lived, weeks left, and how far through the 90 years you are.
2. Add events
Events are the chapters of your life: school, a job, a city you lived in, a relationship, a project. Give each one a start date, an end date and a label, then click add event.
Each event gets its own color on the grid and in the legend table, and the legend shows its dates. Made a mistake? Click the × next to an event to remove it.
Life doesn’t happen one thing at a time, so events can overlap:
- Overlapping events (say, a degree while working) split the box along its diagonal. The top-left half is the event that started first; the bottom-right half is the one that runs longest. If three or more overlap, those two are drawn and the rest show up when you hover.
- Single-week events (a wedding, a move, a big trip) fill the whole box, even on top of longer events, and get a bright outline so they stand out.
3. Hover to explore
Move your mouse over any square to see which week it is, how old you were (or will be), the date it starts, and every event in that week, with its color and dates. The weeks of the event you’re pointing at lift off the page, so you can see its full span at a glance (in a split box, it’s whichever half you point at). Hovering over a row in the legend does the same.
4. Or fill it in from a spreadsheet
If you have a lot of events, typing them in one at a time gets old fast. Instead:
- Click blank template to download a CSV file (or sample file for a filled-in example).
- Open it in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers and fill it in. There’s one
birthdaterow, then oneeventrow per event, with dates written asYYYY-MM-DD. Thecolorcolumn is optional; leave it empty and one is picked for you. - Save it as CSV and click import file.
A few tips:
- In Excel, format the date columns as Text first, so it doesn’t rewrite your dates into another format.
- If a label has a comma in it, it needs quotes around it. Spreadsheet apps handle that for you.
- Rows with problems are skipped and listed on the page, so you can fix them and import again.
- Importing adds to what’s already there and skips exact duplicates. Click clear all first if you want to start fresh.
5. Export
Click export to download everything you’ve entered as a CSV. It’s the same format as the template, so it doubles as a backup you can import later or on another computer.
Dark mode
The calendar follows your device’s light or dark setting automatically.
Privacy
Everything stays in your browser. Your birthdate and events are saved locally on your own device (so they’re still there when you come back), and nothing is uploaded anywhere. Clearing your browser’s site data, or clicking clear all, erases it.