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LIFETIME BLUEPRINT

How to Make a Timeline of Your Life, Decade by Decade, With Scores

By Joshua S. Brogley · October 26, 2026

Part of the series How to Reflect on Your Life by Decade: The Complete Method

A typical life timeline is a line with dates on it: born, school, married, moved, kids. It tells you what happened and nothing about how it went. Add two things, a score for each stretch and the events that changed its direction, and the same line starts to show the shape of a life. Here is how to build one, using the structure the Lifetime Blueprint uses for exactly this.

Use decades, not years

Single years are too small to show the shape of who you are becoming, and a whole lifetime is too large to draw conclusions from. A decade is roughly how long it takes for one version of yourself to give way to the next, which is why the Blueprint organizes the past into seven chapters: the Childhood, the Adolescence, the Twenties, Thirties, Forties, Fifties, and the Sixties and After.

Score each decade twice

Each decade gets two scores per domain. During: map the phases of the decade, weigh each by its length, and average them. At the End: where you stood as it closed. The pair tells a story a single number cannot. The book's worked example scores a reader's thirties in Health: three steady years, two years of a back injury and surgery, two years rebuilding, three years steady again. During comes to 5, At the End to 7: a hard decade, finished stronger. Swap the numbers and it is the opposite life. How to score a decade has the arithmetic.

Put the whole life on one page

The Blueprint collects every decade's scores on a single grid, A Life in Decades, with During and At the End columns for each decade and a line chart of the At the End totals underneath. Going forward, it does the same with every later measurement: a grid with a column for each snapshot, shown here, where you read across a row to see one domain over your whole life and down a column to see one moment. A timeline with numbers is something you can actually read.

Mark the events that bent the line

Then place the major events on the line: births, marriages, deaths, moves, career turns, diagnoses, recoveries. The test for what belongs is the book's own: would the course of your life be meaningfully different if this had not happened? Next to a scored decade, the events explain the bends. The At the End score that jumped two points usually has a move or a decision sitting right before it. The six kinds of life events sorts them.

Keep it going

A timeline that stops today is a history. One that keeps getting points is an instrument. Add a measurement every few years at an interval set by your age, and the line keeps drawing itself forward. How often to review your life gives the interval; backfilling the decades covers the first pass through the past.

Lifetime Blueprint

The hardcover built to be inherited: eight life domains scored across decades, thirty life-event templates, and letters written forward, ending in a Final Letter.

Buy it on Amazon See the book

How do I make a timeline of my life?

Divide your life into decades, score each one for how it went and how it ended, place the major events that changed its direction, and keep adding a point every few years. Put the totals on one chart so the shape is visible.

What should be included in a life timeline?

Births, marriages, deaths, moves, career changes, diagnoses and recoveries, plus a score for each decade so you can see not only what happened but how each stretch went.

Why score a decade twice?

Because a single average hides the story. During shows how the decade went overall; At the End shows where it left you. A 5 and a 7 is a hard decade finished strong; a 7 and a 5 is a good decade that ended in decline.

written by the author, at the kitchen table, after work.