Besides the purpose of encouraging regular reflection, we hope the calendar can help you feel more oriented in your life, help you set goals and hold yourself to them, and remind you to be proud of yourself for what you’ve accomplished and grateful for the diamonds in your spoon. Highlight the weeks in the past in different colors to segment them into “life chapters”—i.e. High School, College, Job 1, Job 2, New City, Engagement, Marriage, etc., or maybe a whole other conception of what a life chapter means to you. You can also mark special boxes where key turning points happened. One of the ways we end up in NeitherLand is by not thinking about things hard enough—so one of the most critical skills is continual reflection and self-awareness. Otherwise, you can fall into an unconscious rut and waste a bunch of precious diamonds. As you can see, schooling took up about 1000 weeks of my life. I’m privileged to have been able to study, but damn, that’s a lot of time… For some people being able to visualise how much time has been spent, or how much time might be left may be a motivator to use their time wisely.

Looking at this spoon of diamonds, there’s one very clear question to ask: “Are you making the most of your weeks?” To help both you and ourselves stay conscious and avoid NeitherLand, we’ve created a Life Calendar that lays out every week of your life on one sheet of paper. We don’t typically bring products into posts, but in this case, they go hand-in-hand. Last year I started with ‘What a f***ing year’. The last 365 days have been far worse than most people expected. In other words, you have this small spoonful of diamonds and you really want to create a life in which they’re making you happy. And if a diamond is not making you happy, it should only be because you’re using it to make other diamonds go down better—either your own in the future or those of others. In the ideal situation, you’re well balanced between #1 and #2 and you’re often able to accomplish both simultaneously (like those times when you love your job). In thinking about my own weeks and how I tend to use them, I decided that there are two good ways to use a diamond:

I still had moments where I would look at the calendar and get a fresh kick of motivation, but at times it became the distraction

The best way to change your life around is to create your very own 90 day plan for what you want to focus on next. It might sound painful, but it’s worth it. If you’re a new parent, it might be fun to make one for your child so they can look at it later and have some info on what happened in the first few years of their life. Note: If you want to print this post or read it offline, the PDF is probably the way to go. You can buy it here. This post is inspired by WaitButWhy’s blog Your Life In Weeks. I strongly recommend reading this piece and more writing from Tim Urban. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile.

As with every year on earth, I learned a few lessons which are important to me. Here are a few of the most important ones: Don’t judge yourself on other people’s happiness Unless otherwise stated, we could not find a student discount code for My Life in Weeks. It’s not common for online stores to offer student discounts but when they do become available we’ll list them here. In the event there is no student discount, you can still save with our coupon codes offered. Does My Life in Weeks Offer a Military or First Responder Discount? Personalize your life in weeks spreadsheet. Color code your life by what you were doing at the time. Note key life milestones within their specific weeks. You could even add the day the pandemic began and the day the endemic started if you’d like. The deeper you’re willing to dive, the better the result. Get real with your life so far and take a few mins to answer these three questions:Everything you’ve already done is in the past. You can’t change it. But what you can do is look to the future and live the life you want to live. The boxes can also be a reminder that life is forgiving. No matter what happens each week, you get a new fresh box to work with the next week. It makes me want to skip the New Year’s Resolutions—they never work anyway—and focus on making New Week’s Resolutions every Sunday night. Each blank box is an opportunity to crush the week—a good thing to remember. With the pandemic ending and the world moving on, I wanted to start fresh with a bird’s eye view of all that came before.

In reality, this was all in my head. Once I began telling people, they could not have been more supportive of me, my career, and my decision! This learning goes beyond work and has helped me be happier in every aspect of life. Family >>>This year I have learned an extremely important lesson — My happiness is not tied to what others think about me. This feels obvious. And feels like something people tell you all the time. But was not something that I was living. It kind of feels like our lives are made up of a countless number of weeks. But there they are—fully countable—staring you in the face.