Life in Weeks Calculators: 13 Grids, Apps and Posters
The best life-in-weeks calculator depends on where it will live. A free browser grid is enough if the point is to see the number once. A phone app puts it in sight every day. A wall poster turns it into a daily object. Thirteen tools are listed below, each verified at its vendor page in October 2026. The grid itself is the same idea everywhere: one square per week of a human life, usually drawn against 80 years. What changes is the surface it sits on. People also call it "your life in weeks", a life calendar in weeks, or a memento mori calendar.
Why the grid lands harder than the number
The format predates the apps by about a decade. Tim Urban published "Your Life in Weeks" on Wait But Why in May 2014, drawing a 90-year calendar of roughly 4,680 squares and arguing that most readers were already partway through theirs. The British journalist Oliver Burkeman supplied the other famous number. His book Four Thousand Weeks starts from the arithmetic of an 80-year life; in his words, "If you live to be 80, you'll have had about 4,000 weeks." That is where the 4000 weeks calculator phrasing comes from.
The observation worth noticing is that the number alone does little work. A sentence about 4,000 weeks reads as abstract. A grid of 4,000 squares, with some of them already filled, reads as a fact. Human attention does something different with the picture than it does with the figure, which is why every tool below is a picture, not a counter.
What actually matters when picking one
Four practical criteria separate one tool from another.
Where it lives. A browser grid is checked once and closed. A phone grid is seen whenever the device unlocks. A poster is seen whenever the eyes cross the wall. The right surface depends on how often the reader wants the reminder.
What it stores about you. Some tools run entirely in the browser and keep the birth date on the device. Others save a cookie, require an account, or send the date to a server. For a tool that reads a sensitive date, this matters.
Free or paid. Most browser grids are free. Most iOS apps have a free download and a paid tier for exports, themes, or widgets. Posters are physical objects and priced per unit.
How long a life it draws. Some grids use a fixed 80 or 90 years. Others size the grid to the average life expectancy for your country. Either way it is an average across a whole generation, not a forecast for the person holding the device, so a tool that lets you change the number is easier to live with.
Thirteen life-in-weeks calculators, apps and posters, verified October 2026
Features and free tiers change, so check the vendor's page before you build a habit around one.
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Your Life in Weeks (Bryan Braun): Best for a plain life-in-weeks grid in the browser. Free web page. Enter a birth date and the grid fills in, with ages marked down the side. The page credits Urban's Wait But Why post directly, runs without an account, and has a print button.
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Your Life in Weeks (Weekplan): Best for a grid that runs entirely in the browser. Free web tool. Weekplan is a planning app, but this page is a stand-alone life-in-weeks grid that works without signing up. Birth date in, grid out.
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4K Weeks: Best for a physical life-in-weeks poster. Paid poster; check the site for formats. The shop sells life-in-weeks posters, framed and unframed.
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My Life in Weeks (WeeksOfLife): Best for a simple grid you can download or print. Free web page. A quiet, text-light page: enter a birth date, update the grid, then download or print it.
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Life Weeks: Best for tracking your weeks over time rather than seeing the grid once. Check the site for platforms and pricing.
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Lifev - Life In Weeks: Best for an iPhone grid with exports and data kept on the device. iOS app; free download, premium tier. The App Store listing says the birth date and settings live locally on the phone.
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Weeks - Memento Mori: Best for a minimalist black-and-white memento mori calendar. iOS app. The visual is deliberately plain: a minimalist grid of filled and empty cells in black and white.
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Memento Mori Life Calendar: Best for a week-by-week grid with a Stoic framing. iOS app, also listed for iPad. The product name borrows the Latin phrase from classical Stoicism; the grid itself works the way the others do.
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Lifetime: Life Progress: Best for a dot-per-week grid with a progress tracker. iOS app with a paid Pro tier. Each dot is a week; the app also sends weekly check-ins on your own goals.
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Your Life in Weeks (zserge): Best for a printable PDF life in weeks poster. Digital download via Gumroad. A printable PDF to print at home or send to a print shop.
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Life Calendar (Wait But Why): Best for the original 90-year poster from Tim Urban's blog. Paid poster; check the store for availability. This is the artefact that started the online genre in 2014.
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Age in Weeks Calculator (DQYDJ): Best for an exact age in weeks, without a grid. Free web calculator. Returns a number — useful when the point is to know the figure rather than to see it.
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Life in Weeks (Smartonic): Best for a private grid sized to your country's life expectancy, with a share card and a printable poster. Free web tool. The birth date stays in the browser; the poster prints on A4, A3 or Letter, or saves as a PDF.
By format: a browser grid, a phone grid, or a poster on the wall
Three reader situations map cleanly onto a short list.
Browser. The grid is checked occasionally: birthday weeks, year ends, mid-life resets. Bryan Braun's version, Weekplan's mini-tool, and the Smartonic tool each do this without an account. DQYDJ's calculator is the pick when a bare number is enough.
Phone. The grid is seen every time the device unlocks. Lifev is the practical pick when the data staying on the device matters, with widgets available on the home screen. Weeks - Memento Mori and Lifetime: Life Progress cover the same ground with different styling; Memento Mori Life Calendar is the Stoic-flavoured option on iPad.
Wall. The grid becomes a daily object. The Wait But Why Life Calendar is the original print; 4K Weeks offers newer formats; zserge's Gumroad PDF is the cheapest route when the printer is already in the room.
What a life-in-weeks grid will not do for you
A life-in-weeks grid cannot stretch time. It cannot predict how many weeks remain for the specific person looking at it. Any product that draws a confident end-line is reading from a national actuarial table, not from the individual's health, family history, or luck. Any tool that promises a weeks-remaining number is guessing with a population average.
One thing is worth deciding before you pick. A poster can fade into the wallpaper within a month; a widget on a phone you check all day stays in sight. The visibility is the product. The art is secondary.
Ikigai, the Japanese idea of a reason to get up in the morning, is sometimes paired with the grid, as if seeing the squares will supply the morning. The grid is only the question. The morning still has to be built. For the longer treatment of the term and where the four-circle Western version came from, see our main piece on the ikigai test.