Life in weeks calculator

Where the numbers come from

All of them come out of a piece we published about doing this by hand: I calculated my remaining weekends, and it scared me into action. The anchor figure is the one in that article — if you live to be 80, you get about 4,000 weeks. Fifty-two a year, eighty years, and that's the budget. At 32, 1,664 of them were already gone.

The rest is division. Summers left is simply the number of years between you and the horizon, because you get one a year — the same arithmetic we used in our guide to bucket list apps to point out that if you realistically travel long-haul once a year, the number of trips left is uncomfortably specific. Free weekends is that same span times twelve months times however many weekends a month you said were actually yours.

That last input is the only judgement in the whole thing, which is why it's asked rather than assumed. Nominally everyone gets four weekends a month. In practice most people can name two, and the honest number is usually the smaller one.

Why the horizon is a question and not a guess

Plenty of tools like this ask for your country and your sex and hand back a death date off an actuarial table. We don't, for two reasons. The first is that a population average tells you very little about one person, and dressing it up as a personal figure is a bit of a con. The second is that the useful horizon isn't the end of your life anyway — it's the end of the stretch where you're still up for the things on the list. The original article puts it as wondering how many "healthy, active" weekends were left before the knees gave out. That age is yours to estimate, and you'll estimate it better than an average will.

So move it around. Watching every number swing when you change 70 to 90 is a fair reminder of how soft the whole exercise is. The point was never precision.

What the number is actually for

Here's the thing most people find when they run it: for a typical list, there's plenty of room. Ten items across a few hundred free weekends is one every couple of years. Time, it turns out, usually isn't the constraint.

Which tells you what the constraint is. A list sits untouched not because the weekends ran out but because none of the items have a date attached, and "someday" isn't a day of the week — it's the thing we say to avoid the discomfort of choosing. If you didn't put a date on it, it wasn't a plan. It was a fantasy.

The one case where the arithmetic really does bite is a list long enough that it can't fit. That's worth knowing too, and the answer isn't to go faster. It's to cut it down to the two or three you'd genuinely regret missing.

• The article this came from — and why the number made its author angry rather than depressed
• Why your annual plan needs less features and more "death awareness"
• The best bucket list apps — an honest map, including the ones that beat ours at things

Frequently asked questions

How many weeks are there in a life?

About 4,000, if you live to be 80 — fifty-two weeks a year for eighty years. It's a small enough number to hold in your head, which is exactly what makes it land. At 32 you've already spent 1,664 of them.

Is this a life expectancy calculator?

No. It doesn't predict how long you'll live, and no calculator honestly can. You choose the age you expect to still be up for doing the things on your list, and the tool does the arithmetic between here and there. Move the horizon and every number moves with it.

Why does it count weekends instead of weeks?

Because most weeks are already spoken for by work, sleep, and everything that has to happen anyway. The weekends you genuinely control are what a bucket list actually gets built out of, and there are far fewer of them than the raw week count suggests.

Is the life in weeks calculator free, and is my data stored?

It's free, there's no sign-up, and nothing you type leaves your browser. The calculation runs on your device and stops there — your age is never sent to a server.

What do I do with the number once I have it?

Put a date on one thing. A goal without a date is not a plan, it's a fantasy — and the count of free weekends is only useful insofar as it makes one of them stop being someday.