What is Eternal?
Time Garden Eternal is the local-AI bundle that adds rollup summaries, auto-rated Wheel of Life, year-in-review, and Q&A.
Time Garden Eternal is the AI tier of Time Garden. It adds an entire layer of automation on top of the free Time Garden base — and crucially, it does so entirely on your local machine.
No cloud. No subscription per-use. No data ever leaving your computer.
What Eternal Adds
The free Time Garden gives you:
- The full five-layer structure (daily → weekly → monthly → quarterly → yearly)
- All the charts and visualizations
- The picture galleries
- All the Wheel of Life tracking — but you fill it in by hand
- All the Quick Notes aggregation
Eternal adds AI buttons that take all of that to a different level:
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
| AI Daily Rate + Alias | Reads your daily entry → assigns a 1–10 rating + a 3-phrase alias |
| AI Weekly / Monthly / Quarterly / Yearly Summary | Synthesizes a period summary from the layer below |
| AI Period Alias | Generates a meaningful one-line title for any layer |
| AI Wheel of Life | Fills in all 8 dimensions for the week from your daily entries |
| AI Q&A | Ask any question about any period — see The Q&A System |
| Year in Review | A dedicated, longer-form annual review prompt |
Total: roughly 17 distinct AI operations across all five layers.
Why "Eternal"?
Because the data — and the system that interprets it — lives forever, locally. There's no model getting deprecated, no subscription getting raised, no company suddenly paywalling your past entries. Your local AI runs exactly the way it ran the day you set it up. Forever.
That's a very different value proposition from cloud-AI journaling tools.
How It Works (The Technical Part)
Eternal uses Ollama — a free, open-source tool that runs language models locally on your computer. It's like Docker for AI: install Ollama once, then download the specific models you want.
When you click an AI button in Time Garden:
- The plugin gathers the relevant context (e.g., your daily note's text)
- It sends that to your local Ollama instance over
http://localhost:11434 - Ollama runs your chosen model on your CPU/GPU
- The result comes back and gets written into your note's frontmatter or body
No internet connection required after setup. (Well — except for occasional license validation.)
What You Need
- A computer with reasonable specs. Most Eternal users run on Apple Silicon Macs, Windows machines with a recent CPU, or Linux machines with a discrete GPU. The smaller models (like
phi4-mini) run fine on most hardware. - Ollama installed.
- At least one Time Garden Eternal license.
How To Get Eternal
Buy a license from the Time Garden landing page (or directly: ishortn.ink/buy-time-garden). After purchase, you'll get a license key — paste it into Time Garden's plugin settings.
Manage existing licenses at ishortn.ink/time-garden-orders.
The free version is amazing on its own.
If Eternal isn't in your budget yet, the free Time Garden is still the most beautiful and structurally complete journaling vault in the Obsidian ecosystem. AI is the cherry on top — not the cake.
"Local AI" — What That Really Means
Privacy is the headline feature.
Most modern AI journaling tools send your entries to OpenAI, Anthropic, or another provider. Eternal does not. Every word of every prompt and every response runs on your silicon. The only network traffic from the plugin is occasional license validation — and that's a tiny encrypted ping with no journal content attached.
This matters more than people realize. A journal is the most private document most people will ever write. Eternal is built so you don't have to compromise that.
Next Steps
If you've decided you want Eternal:
- Installing Ollama — get the local AI runtime set up
- Choosing Your AI Models — pick which models to download
- Customizing AI Prompts — tune what each AI button asks for
- Chunking Settings Explained — control how much context each operation sees
Or if you're reading this curiously: come back when you have a few weeks of journaling banked. Eternal becomes much more interesting when it has a body of writing to work with.