tools
- 5: I’ve lived through five complete 10-year blocks. I’m in my fifth decade of life.
- 4: I’m in the 4th year of my current decade (age 54, so: 54 mod 10 = 4).
- 64: It’s been 64 days since my last birthday.
- DECADES reminds you that time comes in arcs, not in moments.
- YEAR_IN_DECADE anchors you in the texture of this 10-year span—not the age, but the position.
- DAYS_SINCE_BIRTHDAY is intimate: it’s the smallest measure that still feels meaningful. A day is nothing. Sixty-four days is a season.
- Calculate days since your last birthday (easy: subtract two dates).
- Calculate total years since birth (year now minus birth year).
- Divide by 10 and take the quotient (decades) and remainder (year in decade).
- Weave it into the morning reflection naturally.
Personal Version Numbers: Marking Time by Your Own Arc
There’s a small script I wrote that runs every morning and sends a reflection to Telegram. Nothing revolutionary—an LLM prompt tuned for quietness, fed through a personal assistant agent, landing in a message queue.
But buried in there is something I find genuinely elegant: a version number system that marks time by your life, not by a calendar or an arbitrary counter.
How It Works
The version is three numbers: DECADES.YEAR_IN_DECADE.DAYS_SINCE_BIRTHDAY
For my birthday (January 3, 1972), today (March 8, 2026) gives: 5.4.64
Every day, this number advances. It’s deterministic, repeatable, and requires no state to track. Any day, you can calculate exactly where you are in your own timeline.
Why This Matters
Most tools count time in ways that mean nothing to us: calendar days, Unix timestamps, session IDs. Some apps try to feel personal by counting “days in a row” (streaks) or “days since you started” (progress bars).
This is different. It’s not measuring adherence or momentum. It’s marking where you are in the deeper rhythm of a life.
The Philosophy
We live in an age of quantification: growth metrics, retention curves, engagement funnels. These systems are designed to be externally observed—by investors, by product teams, by social networks, by ourselves as brands.
What if you built a system that measured time in a way that only you could understand? Not to optimize anything, but to know where you are?
That’s what this version number does. It’s a personal metric. It has no growth potential, no virality, no social comparison. It’s just: here’s your place in your own story, rendered as a number.
The Craft
From an engineering perspective, the elegance lies in simplicity. The algorithm:
The reflection itself is prompted to incorporate this number without announcing it. The LLM reads the version, understands it’s meaningful (not just a label), and works it into the reflection as a quiet marking. Today’s reflection mentions “64”—not as a metric, but as a fact embedded in the texture of the thought.
That’s the real craft: making the personal arithmetic disappear into the prose.
Why This Works at All
The reason this feels right is that it trusts the reader to understand their own timeline. You know what 5 decades means. You know what the 4th year of this 10-year span feels like. You know that 64 days ago, you were in a different season.
The version number doesn’t explain it. It just reminds you that you’re counting.
Build Your Own
If you’re building personal tools, consider: what time metric actually matters to you? Not to your users—to you.
Maybe it’s moons since an event. Maybe it’s seasons in a yearly cycle. Maybe it’s a different arc of life (weeks in a project, days in a sabbatical, chapters in a long read).
The constraint is: make it deterministic, make it repeatable, make it small enough to live in the margin of a reflection, and make it yours.
Then weave it into the things you make. Let the tools you build for yourself speak in your own dialect of time.
That’s worth more than any viral metric.