Aliases & AI-Generated Titles

Aliases are short, human-friendly titles you (or the AI) give each note. They become the spine of every overview view.

Every note in Time Garden has an alias — a short, human-friendly title that captures what the day, week, month, quarter, or year was about.

The filename is a date. The alias is a story.

Where The Alias Appears

When you fill in a daily note's alias as "First day at the new job", that string shows up:

In the navbar of nearby days (so you can see what last Tuesday was just by hovering)
In the parent week's General Overview table
In the parent month's Week Overview
In the parent quarter's Month Overview
In the parent year's Quarters Overview

You write the alias once. It propagates up the entire structure.

How To Set It

Each note has an editable Alias input field near the top. Click into it, type, and press Enter. You can also rewrite it any time — past, present, or future.

There's no character limit, but in practice:

Daily aliases: 1–8 words, snapshot of the day
Weekly aliases: 1–6 words, the week's theme
Monthly aliases: 1–4 words, the month's headline
Quarterly aliases: 1–3 words, the quarter's identity
Yearly aliases: 1–3 words, the year's name

Or Let The AI Do It

Every note has an AI Alias button. Click it, and Time Garden:

Reads what you've written
Sends it to your local AI model (see Eternal)
Generates 3 candidate phrases capturing the most distinctive moments
Combines them into your alias

For dailies, the AI looks at your journal body, the rating you set, and the quick notes you tagged. For weekly+, it works from the period's summary.

Daily AI Rate + Alias.

For daily notes there's a combo button — AI Rate + Alias — that does both in one shot. It's faster than two separate calls and uses the same context for both.

Why "Specific" Aliases Matter

A vague alias is useless. A specific one is gold.

❌ Vague	✅ Specific
Good day	Long walk in Borghese, espresso
Hard week	Cold + project slipping
Bad month	Recovery from surgery
Reflection year	Moved to Berlin, started lifting

The AI prompts that ship with Time Garden lean specific by default — they're explicitly told to extract concrete events, not generic words. (See Customizing AI Prompts if you want to tune them.)

When AI Aliases Go Wrong

If your AI alias comes back generic ("A productive day"), it usually means:

Your daily entry was very short → not enough signal to extract specifics
The model you're using is too small → upgrade to a more capable one in Choosing Your AI Models
The prompt is asking for the wrong thing → see Customizing AI Prompts

For chronic generic-output issues, Dealing with useless AI answers has the full troubleshooting flow.

A Workflow That Works

Write your daily entry first.
Set the rating. (See The Rating System.)
Tag any highlights/ideas/progress.
Hit AI Rate + Alias. Read what it suggests.
Tweak the alias if it missed the most important thing.

Total time: ~30 seconds beyond the writing itself. That's the whole "tax" for getting your week / month / year overviews to feel meaningful instead of being a wall of dates.

Up Next

The Rating System — the alias's twin
Customizing AI Prompts — how to make AI aliases feel more you
Quick Notes — Highlights, Ideas, Progress — the tag system that feeds aliases