A Life Timeline Template (And Why the Template Is the Easy Part)

Here is the template. Two versions, no email required, no signup.

• Life timeline template — spreadsheet (CSV) — opens in Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets.
• Life timeline template — printable page (PDF) — one sheet, for filling in by hand or working through with a parent.

The rest of this post is what the columns mean, how to fill it in without stalling, and the part that template posts usually leave out: what happens to it after.

What is in it

Ten columns, chosen because they are the minimum that produces a usable record. The column names are the ones our own importer reads, which is deliberate — if the template were a simplified toy, everything you entered would need re-typing the moment you outgrew it.

• lane — which part of life this belongs to: residence, education, work, health, travel, sports, achievements, pets, military, publications. This one column is what makes the whole thing sortable later.
• type — range or point. A job is a range. Graduating is a point. Getting this roughly right is what lets a timeline show duration rather than a row of dots.
• title — short and plain. "Software engineer, Halvorsen" beats "my time at the company".
• start and startMonth — year is required, month is optional. Leave the month blank rather than guessing at it.
• end and endMonth — blank means either ongoing or a point event. Both are fine and both are common.
• location — city and country is enough. This one is a free-text note for your own reference; it is the only column the importer does not read, because the app stores places as map coordinates you set when you add the event.
• description — one or two sentences on what this actually was. Optional, and the thing you will most wish you had written.
• privacy — PRIVATE, SHARED or PUBLIC. Leave it as PRIVATE unless you have a reason; it is the safe default and it is what an empty cell becomes on import.

A few example rows are filled in at the top of the spreadsheet. Delete them once you have the pattern.

How to fill it in without stalling

• Do residences first. Everyone can list where they have lived, in order, and each address drags a period of life along with it. It is the cheapest possible start and it makes the next pass easier.
• Then jobs and schools. Also mostly recallable, also strongly dated, and between them these three lanes will cover most of your adult life.
• Then one pass per remaining lane. Travel, health, achievements. Doing one lane at a time works far better than trying to remember a year at a time.
• Guess the year. If you are unsure, write your best guess and keep going. Approximate and present beats exact and absent, every time.
• Stop at tired, not at finished. It is never finished. Fifty rows is already a real record.

An hour gets most people to somewhere between eighty and a hundred and fifty rows, which is a genuine account of a life and considerably more than existed before.

Why the template is the easy part

Now the honest bit, and the reason this post is not just a download link.

Filling in a template is a pleasant afternoon. Almost everyone who downloads one completes it, at least partially, and feels good about it. Then the file goes into a folder. Eleven months later something happens that should be on it — a move, a job, a diagnosis — and the file does not come to mind, because nothing in a spreadsheet ever reminds you it exists. Two years later you find it while looking for something else, notice it is badly out of date, and feel slightly worse than if you had never made it.

This is not a discipline failure and a better template does not fix it. Spreadsheets are inert. They do not surface, they do not prompt, they do not show you the gap between the last row and today. Every static life-history artifact — the template, the notebook, the document called My Life — dies at the same point, which is the second visit.

The other thing a spreadsheet cannot do is show you the shape. Rows sorted by year are a list, and a list hides exactly what a life timeline is for: the overlaps, the dense years, the long quiet stretches, the fact that the move and the new job and your father getting ill were all the same eighteen months. You can see that instantly on a chart and essentially never in a grid.

When to stop using the template

Use it as long as it is working. It is a completely legitimate tool, it costs nothing, it belongs to you, and it will still open in thirty years. For a lot of people that is the right answer permanently, and we would rather you had a maintained spreadsheet than an abandoned account.

Software earns its keep at two specific points. The first is when you want to see the shape rather than the list. The second is when you notice the file has gone stale — that is the moment where the thing you need is not a better grid but something that persists, prompts, and is already open when the thought arrives.

If you want to see the difference before deciding, the demo is a complete sample life you can click through with no signup — same data a filled-in template holds, rendered as a chart. And because the headers are the ones our importer reads, an hour in the spreadsheet is never wasted: drop the file into Import and the rows come across as events, with only the free-text location column left behind. Free for the first 25 events, with pricing beyond that.

Either way, download the thing and fill in the residences. The tool matters much less than getting the first fifty rows out of your head.