The Rating System
The single number that powers half of Time Garden — how to use the daily rating, what it feeds, and how to keep it honest.
The rating is the cheapest, highest-leverage habit in Time Garden.
It's a single number — 1 to 10 — that you set on each daily note. That number quietly powers half the visualizations in your journal.
How To Set It
On any daily note, find the rating bar near the top:
⭐ Rating ━━━━━━━━━━━━● 7Drag the slider, or click anywhere along the bar. The number updates instantly. That's it. You're done.
What That One Number Powers
A daily rating ripples upward through every layer:
- Weekly — bar chart of the week's ratings, one bar per day. Color-coded green (≥8), yellow (5–7), red (<5).
- Monthly — line graph of the month's ratings, often smoothed
- Quarterly — quarter-long progression chart
- Yearly — annual line chart, plus the famous "Top Days" dataview table that auto-lists every day you rated 9 or 10
- Yearly average — a single summary number for the year
Set the rating once. See it everywhere.
What Should A 7 Mean?
Up to you. But here's a starting frame that's worked well for many users:
| Rating | Vibes |
|---|---|
| 10 | Once-in-a-year. Wedding day, mountaintop, "I'll remember this forever" |
| 9 | Outstanding day. Genuinely great. |
| 8 | Really good. Smiled a lot. |
| 7 | Solidly positive. Above average. |
| 6 | Decent. Slight tilt to the good side. |
| 5 | Neutral. The middle. |
| 4 | A little off. Slight disappointment. |
| 3 | Hard. Stress, sadness, or heavy weight. |
| 2 | Bad day. |
| 1 | One of the worst days of the year. |
Calibrate by year.
If every day in February is a 9, you've got room above. If every day is a 3, your scale is squashed at the bottom. Aim for a year where you use the full range — that's when the visualizations get truly interesting.
Should The AI Rate For Me?
You can have the AI generate a rating from your written entry. The button is on every daily note, labeled AI Rate or AI Rate + Alias. (See Aliases & AI-Generated Titles.)
The AI is decent but biased toward the middle (5–7). For ratings to be meaningful, your honesty matters more than the AI's accuracy — so most users let the AI suggest, then nudge it.
Settings for which model the AI uses, and how it's prompted, live in Choosing Your AI Models and Customizing AI Prompts.
Other Layers Have Their Own Ratings
- Weekly — there's no manual weekly rating; it's the average of the daily ratings
- Monthly — same; computed from dailies
- Quarterly — there's a
quarterRatingfield that you can set manually if you want to override the average; useful for quarters where one bad week shouldn't drag the whole vibe down - Yearly — auto-averaged from dailies
The Wheel of Life on weekly+ notes works differently — that's eight separate ratings per layer. See The Wheel of Life.
The Most Important Tip
Set the rating *before* you write.
It's tempting to write the entry first, then rate at the end. But by then, your rating is biased by what you just wrote about. Setting it first — quickly, gut-feel — gives you a more honest data point.
Up Next
- The Wheel of Life — eight finer-grained ratings, weekly
- Charts & Visualizations — what the rating actually becomes
- Aliases & AI-Generated Titles — the rating's companion field