Monthly Notes
Monthly notes turn a month of dailies into a single, navigable view of your life — with charts, summaries, and AI rollups.
The monthly note is where the shape of your life starts to emerge.
It auto-creates the first time you visit a given month, lives in 03 Monthly/[year]/, and is named like 2026-04-April.md.
What's Inside
Banner + Navbar
Themed banner per month (April looks different from October), plus a navbar for navigating between months, jumping up to the quarter, or back down to the weeks.
Alias + Summary
- Alias — a one-line label for the month
- Summary — a paragraph (yours, or AI-generated) capturing the month's arc
The AI summary here pulls from your weekly summaries, not your daily entries — so the higher you go, the more "synthesized" the picture becomes. (Tunable in Chunking Settings Explained if you want it to use dailies instead.)
⭐ Monthly Rating
- Average — computed across the month's days
- Rating chart — usually a line graph showing the month's daily ratings, so you can see the rhythm
🖼️ Picture Gallery
Every image from every day of the month, auto-collected.
📋 Logs
Aggregated #progress, #idea, and #highlight tags from the entire month. (See Quick Notes — Highlights, Ideas, Progress.)
🗓️ Week Overview
A list of the four (or five) weekly notes in this month, each with its alias. Click into any week to drill down.
☸️ Wheel of Life Overview
This is where it gets interesting. The monthly Wheel of Life shows:
- An average wheel combining all weekly wheels of the month
- A category-progression chart — pick any of the eight life dimensions and watch how it evolved week by week
- A chart-type picker — toggle between line / bar / radar / polar area
The progression chart is one of Time Garden's most underrated features. Watching your "health" or "career" line rise across four weeks is deeply motivating.
💬 Q&A
Ask anything about the month — Time Garden uses your weekly summaries (and optionally daily summaries) as context.
Where Monthly Notes Live
03 Monthly/
└── 2026/
├── 2026-01-January.md
├── 2026-02-February.md
├── 2026-04-April.md
└── ...The full month name in the filename means they sort beautifully and read clearly.
When Should I Open My Monthly Note?
The first-day-of-the-month ritual.
On the 1st, look back at the previous month. Fill in or AI-generate the summary. Glance at the rating chart. Watch the Wheel of Life progression. Five-ish minutes — and you walk into the new month with real perspective on the last one.
You don't have to write anything in monthly notes — they're useful even if you never type a character into them, just from the auto-aggregation alone. But ten sentences of reflection make them magical years later.
How It Connects
- Pulls from: 4–5 weekly notes
- Pushes to: the quarterly note that contains it
A Note on AI Summaries
The AI summary button on monthly notes uses chunking to fit a whole month into your model's context window. By default it summarizes your weekly summaries; you can configure it to chunk dailies if you want more granular results. (Slower, but richer.)
If the result feels generic or off, this page can help.
Up Next
- Quarterly Notes — where months roll up
- The Wheel of Life — full breakdown of the eight dimensions
- Charts & Visualizations — what each chart actually means