The Wheel of Life
The Wheel of Life is Time Garden’s eight-dimension life snapshot, tracked weekly, that reveals patterns across months and years.
The Wheel of Life is Time Garden's secret weapon. It's an eight-dimension snapshot of how your life is going overall — and, tracked across weeks, months, quarters, and years, it reveals patterns you'd never notice from raw daily entries.
The Eight Dimensions
Time Garden tracks these eight categories:
| Dimension | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Spiritual | Meaning, philosophy, religion, mindfulness, gratitude |
| Career | Work, professional growth, primary occupation |
| Relationships | Romantic / family / closest people |
| Health | Body, fitness, sleep, energy |
| Growth | Learning, skill development, personal development |
| Recreation | Hobbies, fun, play, rest |
| Social | Friends, community, broader connections |
| Finance | Money, savings, financial security |
Each one gets a 1–10 rating per week, plus an optional short summary explaining the rating.
Where You Fill It In
The Wheel of Life is filled in on the weekly note.
Open any week, scroll to the ☸️ Wheel of Life section, and you'll see eight rating sliders — one per dimension. Set each one. Optionally add a one-line [Dimension]Summary for context.
You can also click the AI Wheel of Life button to have Time Garden fill it in from your daily entries. Then nudge whichever ratings feel off.
Five minutes, one Sunday a week.
Filling the wheel takes 3–7 minutes. Doing it once a week, every week, gives you a full year of life-shape data — across eight dimensions — that no other journaling app can match.
Why Weekly And Not Daily?
Daily wheel-of-life ratings are too noisy. One bad sleep skews health. One fight skews relationships. The point of the wheel is to surface patterns, not jitter.
Weekly is the sweet spot: long enough to average out noise, short enough to track real change.
How It Aggregates Up
| Layer | What you see |
|---|---|
| Weekly | Your wheel for that week (a polar area / radar chart of the eight dimensions) |
| Monthly | The average of all weekly wheels in the month, plus a category-progression chart |
| Quarterly | The average across the 3 months, plus category progression by month |
| Yearly | The annual average, plus the eight dimensions across the four quarters |
The category-progression chart is where this gets deeply useful. Pick "Health" on your monthly note and watch how it moved week by week. Pick "Career" on your yearly note and watch your year of work in eight data points.
The Chart-Type Picker
On monthly, quarterly, and yearly Wheel of Life sections, there's a chart type picker:
- Line — best for spotting trends over time
- Bar — best for comparing periods
- Polar Area — best for current shape
- Radar — best for showing balance across all eight dimensions
Switch any time. The data stays the same; the lens changes.
A Common Question: "What If A Dimension Doesn't Apply To Me?"
You can rename them.
The eight dimensions are conventions, not laws. If "Spiritual" doesn't fit your life but "Creative" does, you can edit the dimension labels in your templates. (See Adjusting Templates Yourself for where they live.) Just don't remove a dimension — the charts assume there are eight.
Some users keep all eight even if one is consistently low (e.g., "Finance" while a student) — because seeing it stay low is itself a useful signal.
How To Make The Wheel Useful
- Be honest, not aspirational. Rate where things are, not where you want them to be.
- Use the full range. If everything is 7–9, the chart is flat and useless. Force yourself to differentiate.
- Write the optional summaries — at least for the highest and lowest dimensions. Future-you will want context.
- Look at progression charts monthly. That's where the value lives.
What If I Skip A Week?
Nothing breaks. The progression chart skips that week. The monthly average uses only the weeks you filled in. Don't backfill from memory — you'll just be guessing.
Up Next
- Weekly Notes — the layer where you fill it in
- Charts & Visualizations — what each chart type actually shows
- Customizing AI Prompts — tuning the Wheel of Life AI prompt