I found the Vis Timeline tool a year ago, and I love it. It’s just an HTML file (with some required packages) that displays an interactive timeline in your browser. You edit it in a text editor, adding events (single dates) and periods (with start and end dates).
What I love about it is that you can categorize events and then selectively show or hide them, to view your past from different perspectives. I can look up things like, “What was going on in the world when I first moved to Seattle?” “What ideas were important to me when my first relationship ended?” “Who was I hanging out with when I started writing this blog?” Or I can show every category at once and see a full snapshot of my life at any given point.
Choose events
I don’t use my timeline like a journal; I’ve only added events that I consider important in hindsight (often I have to go back and look them up in my journal or calendar to get the approximate dates). I’ll only update the timeline every two years. If it were more frequent than that, I think I’d be too present-biased, adding many events that later turn out to be inconsequential. I have my journal for raw data, but the timeline is for events that illustrate the major arcs of my life. That’s just what I personally use it for.
After you follow the installation instructions, you can optionally replace timeline.html with my template to get started with the set of categories I use. The sample events I included might help you think of your own events. The categories are:
- School – Any education. Formal schooling and other courses you took.
- Work – Employment and side hustle projects.
- Philosophy – Ideas or ideologies that were important to you. Things you read that stuck with you.
- Lifestyle – Goals and values you had. Insights about yourself.
- Fitness – Programs you followed, and any physical milestones.
- Friendships – When you met important people in your life.
- Relationships – Romantic relationships—when they started and ended.
- Residence – Where you lived, and when you moved.
- Travel – Short-term trips you took.
- Creative outlets – When you started and stopped creative hobbies or projects. When you found new channels to share your work in.
- World events – Major events in the world that you were paying attention to at the time.
The instructions for managing categories and subcategories and events are all in that Vis Timeline tool link. This tool is one of the many ways you can connect to your past selves.