Quarterly Notes

Quarterly notes are the layer where the shape of your life starts to emerge — three months of patterns, one page.

A quarter is three months — and it's the layer where Time Garden starts to feel less like a journal and more like a flight log of your life.

Quarterly notes auto-create when you visit them, live in 04 Quarterly/[year]/, and are named like 2026-Q2.md.

What's Inside

A seasonal banner (Q1 = winter, Q2 = spring, Q3 = summer, Q4 = autumn — though you can customize), plus a navbar linking the three months and the parent year.

Alias + Summary

Alias — a label for the quarter ("Recovery quarter," "Big launch quarter," "The travel one")
Summary — paragraph synthesized from monthly summaries

This is where AI-generated summaries start to be really valuable — three months is too much to hold in your head, and an honest summary highlights themes you might have missed.

⭐ Quarterly Rating

Average — across all daily ratings in the quarter
Rating chart — usually showing the quarter's progression, often with a smoothed trend line

🖼️ Picture Gallery

Every image from every day of the quarter, auto-aggregated. A scroll through your quarterly gallery is one of the quietly emotional moments in Time Garden.

📋 Logs

Three months of #progress, #idea, and #highlight tags, all aggregated. This is when you actually realize how much you've done — even if it didn't feel like it day-to-day.

🗓️ Month Overview

A linked list of the three monthly notes with their aliases.

☸️ Wheel of Life Overview

Average wheel of the quarter (synthesized from monthly wheels)
Category progression chart — watch any one of the eight dimensions across the three months
Chart-type picker — line / bar / radar / polar area

This is where slow movements become visible. You won't see your "health" trend in a single week. You will see it across a quarter.

💬 Q&A

Ask the AI anything about your quarter. Examples:

"What pattern do I show when I'm overwhelmed?"
"When did I feel most alive this quarter?"
"What kept showing up in my highlights?"

Where Quarterly Notes Live

04 Quarterly/
└── 2026/
    ├── 2026-Q1.md
    ├── 2026-Q2.md
    ├── 2026-Q3.md
    └── 2026-Q4.md

Quarters follow the calendar (Q1 = Jan–Mar, Q2 = Apr–Jun, Q3 = Jul–Sep, Q4 = Oct–Dec).

When Should I Open My Quarterly Note?

The 90-day check-in.

At the end of each quarter, set aside 30 minutes. AI-summarize the quarter. Read the rating chart. Look at the wheel of life progression. Ask three questions. Write what you actually feel, in your own words.

This is the biggest leverage point in the entire Time Garden system. Most journals never offer this view.

You don't have to do this — but if there's one layer worth scheduling on your calendar, it's this one.

How It Connects

Pulls from: 3 monthly notes (and indirectly all weeklies and dailies)
Pushes to: the yearly note

Up Next

Yearly Notes — the highest layer
The Q&A System — getting better answers from your quarter
The Wheel of Life — the dimension-by-dimension view