Time(line) of your Life!

An exercise I’ve found to be useful is creating a timeline of my life (I’ve embedded the link to the template I use below). I organized the data using a spreadsheet, with one row for each month that I’ve been alive.

I created columns to indicate when I reached major life milestones, experienced major losses, began important relationships, finished books that had a big impact on me, etc. I update it a few times per year and try to include the best and worst things that have ever happened to me (i.e., successes, turning points, amazing experiences, trips, career shifts, and important realizations.)

I value this life events timeline for a few reasons:

1. A timeline tells your story. It’s neat to read through it, momentarily reliving your triumphs and important moments, but also, it gives you an objective perspective on what’s happened to you and how you got where you are today. It’s a linear, sequential view of your history, which feels very different from the episodic bits and pieces that come to mind when you mentally recall your past.

2. It pushes you to identify what the milestones in your life ACTUALLY were. While some will be obvious (e.g. graduating from school), others are subtler (e.g. a book you read that changed your perspective, having an important realization, or meeting a certain friend).

3. The longer I live, the easier it is to forget when important things happened, and in what sequence. I enjoy having my timeline as a reference. I predict that I’ll appreciate this aspect more and more as I get older. For instance, it’s neat to be able to see, at a glance, how long I’ve known different friends and how long I worked on various projects.

Imagine creating and maintaining a timeline to then look back at it decades from now and see your entire life’s history in front of you! If you have children or plan to, imagine using it to provide an overview of your life one day!

Here’s the template I use for my life timeline (on google spreadsheets). Feel free to make a copy and use it yourself if you like:

http://bit.ly/2fyP8r1

Helpful tips:

• The left-most column automatically calculates how many years ago an event occurred, so you can immediately see how long ago something was. 
• If you want to add more time (e.g., at the bottom), I recommend pasting the cells for an entire year at a time. If you paste one month at a time, the formula in the left-most column will get messed up.
• If you have trouble remembering when certain events occurred, searching your email and calendar can help narrow down dates.