On Tuesday morning, I opened my Tech Daily Newsletter and discovered
an awesome site by a tech blogger named Gina Trapani.
She had made a website depicting her entire life as a series of little boxes,
annotating and coloring them based on what was happening in her life and in the world.
It was a beautiful—and powerful—way to get a sense of her life and personality in a super-condensed format.
Once I saw it, I immediately wanted my own.
And then I thought—well, if I want one of these, maybe other people do too?
Within thirty minutes I had bought a domain, fired off a tweet for accountability,
and began one of the most frenzied coding / product-building sprees of my life.
For the next three days—until this exact moment in fact—I barely kept up with my email, support for my
other projects, or basically any other responsibilities in my life.
And it was so fun!
I can’t remember ever having this much fun building something.
It’s the perfect combination of not-too-hard, creative, and personally meaningful.
Also, the fact that it’s a passion project instead of something I’m trying to monetize
takes a lot of the normal pressure off.
In fact, I’ve been having so much fun that… it’s started to feel like a problem.
I found myself adding, refining, tweaking, and—of course—digging up little
memories of my life to drop into my timeline with no end in sight.
I genuinely feel like I easily could keep working on this app for another week straight.
And that was when I realized I was committing the cardinal sin of product building.
I was building in a vacuum, for myself, instead of putting something good enough out into the world
and letting other people decide if it’s something anyone wants.
The landing page of my new app, Life in Weeks
So, without further ado, I am proud to announce “Life in Weeks!”
It’s a way to build your own interactive life timeline, with each week represented by a little box.
You can check out my timeline as an example of the type of what you can do with it today.
Obviously it’s rough around the edges, but I’ve really loved building it and using it,
and I hope maybe some of you out there do too.
If you have any questions, feedback, or feature requests drop them in the comments below.
And, without further ado, I will now get back to everything I was supposed to be doing this week.
Notes