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Time management Personal productivity

A Life Calendar

A Life Calendar

Lots of us fellow human beings use the end of the year to reflect back on what has been, and picture what it could be.

I always downplayed the significance of this moment (after all, it is something that we fabricated), but this year I bumped into a bunch of resources that struck a chord with me.
It must be that I am not that young anymore… 🙈

1. Make a list of things that make you happy

The first one is the hero image of this post, that I found on the Twitter account of Action for happiness:

Make a list of things that make you happy
Make a list of things you do every day
Compare the list
Adjust accordingly

2. We have an expiry date

The second one is the ‘Inside the mind of a master procrastinator’ TED Talk by Tim Urban, which is one the most entertaining and profound talks I’ve ever watched.
Before closing his speech, Tim shows the following picture, that represents how many week there are in 90 years (one box = one week): Every box is a week, and this is how many weeks you have in 90 years

Considering that myself and the vast majority of the readers of this post ‘burned’ already a good number of those weeks…well, it’s like a slap in the face: here you have it, your expiry date visualised (assuming that you’ll live that long).

3. Colour coding your contentment

The third was a LinkedIn post that I cannot retrieve at the moment of writing.
The author shared the same picture as Tim Urban, but at the beginning of each line he had the years of his life (1960, 1961, 1962, etc), and the boxes for the past 10 years were dark red, red, green, or dark green, depending on how well those weeks went from a happiness perspective, considering both personal life and work.

A weekly retrospective

So this is what I started doing at the beginning of 2023:

  • I mapped the weeks of my hypothetical 90 years long life on a spreadsheet
  • Every Sunday I reflect on how good or bad my week has been, and I colour its cell accordingly (dark red = awful, red = bad, green = good, dark green = splendid)
  • I keep track of the elements that determine the rating of the week

I hope this will help me pinpoint more clearly what drains my energies and what makes me happy, understand how much of each there is in my days, and adjust accordingly, before it’s too late: the expiry date is right there at the end of the spreadsheet, so it is very difficult to look the other way!

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives (Anne Dillard)