This Terrifying Poster Motivates Me More Than Coffee

Sean Knight
4 min readSep 17, 2021

How facing your own mortality can make you more productive

Photo by Tegan Mierle on Unsplash

My Life in Weeks

This poster shows your life in weeks. It shows the past and — based on life expectancy — it shows the future. Each box is one week. At 32 years old, I’ve got a lot of full boxes.

Each row on the chart is 52 boxes meaning each row shows one year. You can also see that the boxes are sub-divided into grids: small column grids to show months and larger row grids that show decades.

At the end of every week, you have to fill in one of those boxes and acknowledge that that week is now done forever.

Image by author

Why would I want this?

When I tell friends about this the responses have all been pretty similar: “That’s terrifying”, “Why would you want to see that?”, and “Wait, you paid money for that?” were some of my favorites.

Image by author

--

--