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BeHabitual

Habits

Your life in weeks

Every week of a long life fits on one screen. Most of it is still empty.

By Nabeel Mustafa. Updated .

Runs in your browser. Nothing is sent, saved, or shared.

Stays on this device. Nothing is sent.

80 years

A drawing length, not a prediction. 80 is a round number, not a forecast for you.

Enter a date of birth to draw the grid. The grid length has to be longer than your current age.

A calculator answers once. If you want this number to move over months, that needs a record: a free habit tracker that shows the whole month on one screen.

Track it as a habit

What the grid is, and what it is not

Each square is one week. Each row is one year of age, starting on your birthday, with 52 squares across. The filled squares are weeks you have already lived. The outlined one is this week.

The length of the grid is a setting, not a forecast. It defaults to 80 rows because 80 is a round number. It knows nothing about your health, your family, or where you live, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Move the slider and the empty part changes; your actual future does not.

Why looking at it helps some people and not others

Seen as a grid, a year stops feeling like a lot. Fifty-two squares. A habit you mean to start 'soon' has a row, and the row is visibly getting used.

For some readers that is motivating. For others it is plain anxiety with a nice layout, and there is no shame in closing the tab. If a picture of weeks makes you freeze rather than act, the better tool is a small habit tracked one day at a time. The squares there are days you did something, not days you lost.

Why every row has exactly 52 squares

A year is 52 weeks and one or two days. If every row carried that remainder, the grid would drift, and by row 40 the squares would no longer line up with birthdays. So the week within each row is worked out from days since your last birthday and capped at 52. A few days a year are absorbed. The picture stays true to your age, which is the thing it is for.

Draw your life in weeks

  1. Enter your date of birth

    It stays on your device. The grid is drawn in your browser.

  2. Set how many years to draw

    80 is the default. It is a drawing length, not a prediction.

  3. Find the outlined square

    That is this week. Everything to its right in the same row is what is left of this year of age.

Questions people ask

How many weeks are in a lifetime?

At 52 weeks a year, 80 years is 4,160 weeks and 90 years is 4,680. The grid uses whatever length you set.

How many weeks have I lived?

Enter your date of birth above. The page counts full weeks since you were born, with each year of age as its own row.

Where does the idea come from?

The life-in-weeks grid was popularised in a widely shared 2014 essay that drew a 90-year life as one poster of week-sized boxes. This page draws the same kind of grid from your own birthday.

Is my birthday stored?

No. It is never sent from your browser, and it is gone when you close the tab.

Other tools

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Numbers are easy. Doing it every day is the hard part.

A calculator tells you where you are once. If the thing you actually want is to keep something up, that takes a record rather than a result.

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