Your life, one box per week

Why look at a life this way

Years are too big to feel and days too many to count. Weeks sit in between: eighty years is about 4,160 of them, few enough to print on a single page. Seeing the filled part next to the empty part does something a number cannot. Most people's first reaction is that the empty part is smaller than they assumed.

The idea is old. Stoic writers kept reminders of mortality on their desks, and the modern "life in weeks" chart was popularised by Tim Urban's Wait But Why essay and Oliver Burkeman's book Four Thousand Weeks.

How the grid is drawn

• Each row is one year of life, starting on your birthday. Each box is one week of that year, 52 to a row.
• Filled boxes are weeks you have lived. The bright one is the week you are in now.
• The grid stops at the age you pick. Nobody knows their number; 80 is a round figure near life expectancy in many wealthy countries.

The phone slider

Set the hours you spend on your phone on a typical day and part of the open area changes colour. That is the share of your remaining waking time, counted at 16 hours a day, that the habit adds up to if it stays the same. At four hours a day it is a quarter of every waking week you have left. It is arithmetic, not a judgement: some of those hours are well spent. The point is to make the choice on purpose.

What to do with it

Print the poster and fill in a box each Sunday. Circle the weeks you want to remember. Or just look at it once, close the tab, and do the thing you have been putting off.