Charts & Visualizations
A tour of every chart Time Garden ships with — bar, line, polar, radar, progression — and what each is best at showing.
A journal you can see is a journal you'll keep using. Time Garden ships with a full set of charts that auto-update from your data — no spreadsheet work, no manual logging.
This page is a quick tour of what each chart shows and where you'll find it.
Color Code (Used Everywhere)
Time Garden uses a consistent color language across all rating-based charts:
- 🟢 Green — rating ≥ 8 (great)
- 🟡 Yellow / Orange — rating 5–7 (neutral)
- 🔴 Red — rating < 5 (rough)
- 🟣 Purple — progression / trend lines
Once you learn the colors, you can read a month's chart in two seconds.
The Charts You'll See
📊 Weekly Rating Bar Chart
Where: Weekly note → Ratings section
What: One bar per day of the week. Color-coded green/yellow/red. Often paired with the week's average as a horizontal line.
Best for: Spotting which days of the week tend to be strongest, recognizing patterns like a Wednesday slump.
📈 Monthly Rating Chart
Where: Monthly note → Ratings section
What: A line / bar combo of every day in the month.
Best for: Seeing the arc of the month — buildup, peak, dip, recovery.
📉 Quarterly Rating Chart
Where: Quarterly note → Ratings section
What: 90 days of ratings, often smoothed.
Best for: Watching long-form trends emerge from the noise.
📈 Yearly Rating Chart
Where: Yearly note → Ratings section
What: 365 daily ratings as a line chart.
Best for: Seasonal patterns, recovery curves, deep year-shape understanding.
☸️ Wheel of Life — Single Period
Where: Weekly / Monthly / Quarterly / Yearly notes
What: Polar area chart showing your eight life dimensions at once. Average for non-weekly layers.
Best for: Understanding current shape. Are you balanced? Lopsided? Where?
📈 Wheel of Life Category Progression
Where: Monthly / Quarterly / Yearly notes
What: A single dimension (e.g., Health) plotted over time within the period.
Best for: Watching individual life-areas evolve.
The chart-type picker above this lets you swap between line, bar, radar, polar area views — same data, different lens. (See The Wheel of Life.)
The "Top Days" Table (Yearly)
Not technically a chart — but worth highlighting. The yearly note auto-builds a dataview table of every day you rated 9 or 10, sorted by rating. Each row is a clickable link to the daily note.
This is the magic table at the end of the year. (See Yearly Notes.)
The Logs Aggregations
Your #progress, #idea, and #highlight tags are aggregated as bullet lists on every higher layer. Not a chart, but the same kind of "auto-built visualization of your data" feeling.
(See Quick Notes — Highlights, Ideas, Progress for the source side.)
How To Customize
The charts are rendered by DataviewJS scripts in 06 Templates/Scripts/templater/dataviewjs/. They're regular JavaScript files. You can:
- Change the colors
- Change the chart type per layer
- Add new chart types
- Hide a chart you don't use
This is intermediate-level customization — see Adjusting Templates Yourself for the safe-editing approach. Most users never touch them.
When Charts Don't Render
Empty chart? Try this:
- Make sure you're in Writing or Reading view (not Source)
- Check that the period actually has data — a brand-new month with zero days has nothing to chart
- Click outside any code block you might be inside (a known issue — see Daily note bugs)
- Close and reopen the note (Obsidian sometimes hiccups on first render)
If it still won't render, the Performance & Slowness page has the heavier diagnostics.
Up Next
- The Rating System — the data feeding most of these charts
- The Wheel of Life — the eight-dimensional view
- Adjusting Templates Yourself — modifying the charts themselves