Your whole life, in weeks.
Enter your birthdate to plot your life.
What is this?
It's an idea from Tim Urban's Your Life in Weeks: draw a long life as a grid of weeks, and suddenly time feels real. Each row is a year; each box, one week. Seeing them all at once — and how many you've already lived — lands in a way a number never does.
About this tool
OYLIW draws a whole human life as a grid of weeks — one small box per week, one row per year — and fills in the ones already lived. It is a keepsake for thinking about time, not a productivity tracker: enter a birthdate, see where you are, and mark the weeks that mattered. The maths and the drawing both happen in your browser, and unless you sign in, your birthdate stays on your device.
Plot your life on a grid
Full demonstration
* this video does not have audio
Common questions
What is OYLIW?
OYLIW (Offload Your Life in Weeks) is a free life calendar. It draws a long life as a grid of about 4,680 weeks — each box one week, each row one year — with the weeks already lived filled in. You can mark milestones and chapters on the grid and export it as an image.
How many weeks have I lived, and how is that worked out?
From a birthdate alone. We count the whole weeks between the day you were born and today — a person born in 1990 has lived roughly 1,900 weeks by 2026. The grid's total length comes from a life-expectancy figure you set yourself: 90 years by default, adjustable from 1 to 125. You can also view the same life in months or years instead of weeks.
Where is my birthdate stored?
On your device, unless you choose otherwise. Your birthdate stays on your device: the maths and the drawing both happen in your browser, and your birthdate, labels, milestones and chapters are saved in your browser's own storage. Signed out — the default, and how most people use this — no network request carries them, and we could not produce them if someone asked. The trade-off is that we cannot recover your grid for you if you clear your browser data. That is what the optional Google sign-in fixes: if you sign in, a copy of your grid is stored on our servers so it can follow you to another device, and it is stored as you entered it — your birthdate and every milestone and chapter date exactly, to the day, because a grid whose dates have been rounded off is not your grid. Signed in, you can also create a shareable link that puts a page for that grid on our servers — anyone holding the link can open it and will see those exact dates, it is never listed in search, and you can switch it off at any time. Publishing a grid publishes the dates in it: if that is not what you want, do not create the link.
Does this predict how long I will live?
No. Life expectancy here is a configurable assumption, not a prediction. The figure you set decides only how large the grid is drawn; it is not actuarial, medical, insurance, or financial advice, and the product knows nothing about you beyond a date you typed in. If this leaves you feeling distressed rather than reflective, please put it down and talk to someone.
Whose idea is this?
It stands on two lovely originals: Tim Urban's Your Life in Weeks, which made the idea unforgettable, and Bryan Braun's interactive version, which first let you enter your own birthdate. We are grateful to both — go read and play with the originals.
What are the life stories?
Short written pieces about a life, made from the milestones and chapters you have marked. You pick the moments and a tone, and a language model writes them up — as a plain biography, or as a fairytale, a fantasy, a piece of literature, or a lore entry. They are keepsakes rather than records: the model writes from what you marked and nothing else, and it can get things wrong or invent detail, so read one as a story about your life rather than an account of it. Writing them costs us money on each one, so they are the part of OYLIW you pay for.
Is it free?
Yes, for what most people do. Drawing a grid, marking it, and exporting an image are free and need no account. Signing in is free too — it saves your grid across devices. Paid plans are optional, and only add life stories and room for more grids.
A paid feature: story of your life
A grid shows the shape of a life. The stories give it words. Pick the moments you have marked and a tone, and we write them up — as a plain biography, or as the same life told as a fairytale, a fantasy, a piece of literature, or a lore entry. The writing is done by a language model that can get things wrong, and it knows only what you marked, so what comes back is a keepsake rather than a record.
People use them for a parent's birthday, for a eulogy they have to write, or to hand a child something about the years before they were born.
What a story looks like
Marks go in. Writing comes out. This is one made-up life, marked and then written in the biography voice — four other voices are available.
A made-up life, not a real person's. These words were written by us as a sample, not generated.
What was marked
- 1932 — Born, fourth of seven
- 1942 — The occupation begins
- 1953 — Married
- 1954 to 1963 — Five children
- 1968 — A flat in a new estate
- 1989 — Her husband dies
What came back
The stall on the southern lanes
My grandmother was ten when the occupation began. It lasted three years. Her eldest brother was taken for questioning during it and did not come back. She was thirteen when it ended, and whatever she became afterwards she became on the other side of that.
She married at twenty-one. Her husband drove a lorry for a timber yard. Five children were born between 1954 and 1963, and through all of it she sold cooked rice from a stall, six days a week, for twenty-two years.
In 1968 the family moved to a flat in one of the new estates. All five children finished school. Two of them went to university.
Her husband died in 1989, when she was fifty-seven. She kept the stall four more years. She has kept the flat ever since — through eleven grandchildren, and then the great-grandchildren, and then the years when the visits settled into a standing arrangement rather than an occasion.
She is ninety-four. Sunday lunch is still at her flat, and she still cooks it.