Yearly Notes

The yearly note is the highest layer in Time Garden — the chronicle of your year, with auto-aggregating top days, summaries, and charts.

The yearly note is the highest layer in Time Garden — and the one that turns a journal into a chronicle.

It auto-creates when you first visit a year, lives in 05 Yearly/, and is named simply 2026.md.

What's Inside

An annual banner (you can swap it for a personally-meaningful image — see Changing the Banners), plus a navbar linking to the four quarters and adjacent years.

Alias + Summary

Alias — your name for the year ("The year of the move," "Recovery year," "The year I started lifting")
Summary — a synthesized paragraph capturing the arc of all twelve months

🤖 AI Buttons

Two distinct AI actions on yearly notes:

Summarize — synthesizes a summary from your quarterly summaries
Year in Review — a dedicated, longer-form review prompt designed specifically for the annual scope. This is the one to run on December 31st.

⭐ Yearly Rating

Annual average — your year's average daily rating
Rating chart — a year-long line graph. Patterns become deeply visible at this scale: seasonal dips, recovery curves, the long tail after a hard month.

🏆 Top Days

A dataview-powered table that automatically lists every day of the year you rated 9 or 10. Sorted by rating descending.

This is the magic table.

At the end of December, scrolling through your top-rated days of the year is one of the most powerful experiences Time Garden offers. Each one is a clickable link straight to the daily note.

🖼️ Yearly Gallery

Every photo from every quarter, every month, every week, every day — all the way back to images embedded in individual daily notes — aggregated into one annual gallery.

🗓️ Quarters Overview

A table of the four quarterly notes with their aliases.

☸️ Wheel of Life Overview

Annual wheel — the synthesized average across all four quarterly wheels
Category progression chart — pick any of the eight dimensions and watch its annual trajectory
Chart-type picker — line / bar / radar / polar area

This is the chart you'll want to print and frame.

Watching one of the eight dimensions move across a full year, especially one you've been working on, is genuinely emotional. Plenty of users save a screenshot of this on January 1.

The yearly Q&A reaches across all your weekly summaries (or further back, depending on your chunking settings). The model takes longer here because there's much more context — but the answers are in a different league.

Examples:

"What did I worry about that turned out fine?"
"When was I happiest, and what did those weeks have in common?"
"What's a habit I started this year that I want to keep?"

Where Yearly Notes Live

05 Yearly/
├── 2024.md
├── 2025.md
└── 2026.md

Filename = year. That's it.

When To Open It

There are two natural times:

The last week of December — run "Year in Review", read the top-days table, fill the wheel-of-life summaries, write what you think it was the year of.
Whenever you need perspective. Bad week? Open last year's yearly note and remember everything you forgot you'd done.

How It Connects

Pulls from: 4 quarterly notes (and transitively, every layer below)
Pushes to: nothing. This is the top of the structure.

A Suggestion

Make the yearly note a ritual.

Some users print their yearly note. Some read it aloud to a partner. Some make a tradition of going through it on New Year's Day with coffee. There's no "right" way — but a journal that doesn't get reread is just a graveyard. Don't skip the rereading.

Up Next

The Welcome Dashboard — the home you'll return to
The Wheel of Life — the dimension-by-dimension breakdown
Aliases & AI-Generated Titles — how to pick a name for your year