Make a Timeline of Your Life

A timeline of your life puts what you remember in order: where you lived, where you went to school, the jobs you had, the people who mattered and the trips you took. Laid out on one date axis, it also shows how those stretches overlapped, which a written list cannot. People make them for a milestone birthday, a memoir or family history, a school assignment, or just to see how a decade actually went.

1. Start with the long stretches

Begin with the parts of your life that lasted years, because they give everything else a frame. Each home, school and job is one event with a start date and an end date, so it draws as a bar across the years it covered.

You rarely need exact dates for these. Preceden accepts a year on its own, such as 1998, or a month and year, such as May 2004. You can also type a whole range into the start date field, such as 2009 - 2014, and Preceden splits it into a start and an end for you. See Supported Date Formats for everything else it understands.

For a stretch that is still going, such as the job you have now, set the end date to Present and the bar keeps running up to today without you having to come back and update it.

2. Add the moments

Next, add the single days: a birth, a graduation, a wedding, a move, the day a pet came home. Leave the end date blank and the event marks one moment on the timeline instead of spanning a range.

If the timeline is for a milestone birthday, Determine Your Exact Age has a calculator for the years, months and days since a birth date, and shows how to have Preceden print a running age on the bar.

If you get stuck trying to remember everything in order, work through one part of your life at a time instead. Finishing every place you have lived before moving on to work usually jogs more memories than starting at birth and going year by year.

3. Give each part of your life a layer

A life has several threads running at once, and layers keep them apart. Try one layer for places you have lived, one for school and work, one for family and relationships, and one for travel. Each layer can have its own color, so the threads are easy to tell apart at a glance.

4. Add photos and notes

You can add a photo to any event, one per event, so the finished timeline doubles as a picture record. Every event also has a Notes field that accepts Markdown, which is the place for the story behind a date: who was there, why you moved, or what you remember most about it.

If a trip deserves more detail than a single event, it can have a timeline of its own. See Create a Travel Journal.

New timelines are private, so only you can see your life timeline until you choose otherwise. When you are ready to show it to someone, you can share a link to it, protect it with a password, or print it for a birthday party, a family reunion or a class. Adjust Timeline Visibility explains each option.