The Q&A System
Ask any question of any period in Time Garden. Local AI answers from your own journal, with no data leaving your computer.
The Q&A system is what makes Time Garden's Eternal tier feel like talking to your past self. You ask a question. The AI reads through that period of your life. It answers — with specific dates, examples, and context.
It runs entirely on your own machine. Nothing leaves your computer.
Where It Lives
Every layered note has a Q&A section near the bottom:
- Daily — answers using just that one day's entry
- Weekly — answers using the week's daily entries
- Monthly — answers using the four weekly summaries (or daily summaries; configurable)
- Quarterly — answers using the three monthly summaries
- Yearly — answers using the four quarterly summaries
The lower the layer, the more granular. The higher the layer, the broader the perspective.
How To Use It
- Open the note for the period you want to query
- Scroll to the Q&A section
- Type your question in the input
- Hit the AI button
- Wait for the answer to appear in the note
The answer is saved.
Your answer becomes part of the note's aiAnswer frontmatter. You can revisit it later, or run a new question to overwrite it.
Question Ideas
The vault ships with 00 Dashboard/Question ideas for Q&A.md — a starter list of questions worth asking. A taste:
Daily
- "What was the emotional shape of today?"
- "What's a small thing that happened that I might forget?"
Weekly
- "Which day of the week was hardest, and why?"
- "What's a pattern from this week worth keeping?"
Monthly
- "What kept showing up in my highlights?"
- "What did I worry about that turned out fine?"
Quarterly
- "How did I change over these three months?"
- "What was the unspoken theme?"
Yearly
- "What's a habit I started this year I want to keep?"
- "What did I do that I'm most proud of?"
- "When was I most alive?"
Add your own to that file — it's just a regular markdown note.
How It Decides What To Look At
For higher layers, the entire period's text might exceed your AI model's context window. So Time Garden:
- Extracts keywords from your question
- Selects the most relevant entries / summaries from that period
- Truncates if needed to fit the model
- Sends the question + selected context to your model
This is configurable in Chunking Settings Explained — you can decide whether monthly Q&A pulls from weekly summaries (faster, less detail) or daily summaries (slower, richer).
What Models Are Used
By default, Time Garden uses different models per layer:
| Layer | Default model |
|---|---|
| Daily | phi4-mini (fast) |
| Weekly | phi4 (smarter) |
| Monthly | phi4 |
| Quarterly | phi4 |
| Yearly | phi4 |
You can swap any of these in Choosing Your AI Models. Bigger / smarter models = better answers, but slower and more memory-hungry.
How To Get Better Answers
Three principles for great Q&A.
- Be specific. "What did I do this week?" gets a generic recap. "What progress did I make on the writing project?" gets concrete examples.
- Use temporal anchors. Ask about a specific span — "first half of the month", "the week of the move" — and the AI focuses there.
- Ask follow-up questions. Each Q&A is a fresh single-shot, but you can keep refining your question and re-running.
If your Q&A answers are consistently vague or wrong, see Dealing with useless AI answers.
A Privacy Note
Every word of every question, every word of context, every word of every answer — stays on your machine. The entire AI pipeline is local (powered by Ollama). Time Garden never sends your journal anywhere.
This is why "ask your journal anything" feels safe in Time Garden in a way it would never feel safe in a cloud-based tool.
Up Next
- What is Eternal? — the AI tier
- Customizing AI Prompts — making Q&A answers feel more you
- Chunking Settings Explained — controlling what context the AI sees