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Life to Date

About this Tutorial

This is a review and improvement of Emmett Shear's Life to Date Sheet. Originally he tweeted about it and shared a sheet. I thought I could make it a bit better looking.

Video Transcript

00:00 Hello, we're gonna review Emmett Shear, the CEO of Twitch's Twitch. We're gonna review his Google Sheet that he made. He's been on this earth for 40 years almost, same as me.
00:15 Similar, I think he's a year older than me. I'm about to reach 40. I just created a- Memento Mori, the dashboard for death, the death dashboard.
00:25 And it's very morose, morbid. And so I saw this and it jumped out on my Twitter feed Emmett Shear and his life to date sheet.
00:37 He also definitely does share this and so that's really- cool. And then Tiago in the comments mentioned or showed this other sort of, I don't know, infographic I guess.
00:53 It's not a sheet but it's a, it sort of shows you your early years, your school years and this probably was um- yeah, he said it probably, I'm sure it was at least partially inspired by seeing this one.
01:07 So I wanted to go over it and just make a couple of interesting little, I want to make a little, a few little updates to it that I think could make it so much better.
01:16 That makes it feel better. Now what's interesting too is that all of the things that I do to make it better don't necessarily make it more shareable.
01:25 I do want to point that out that Emmett is a CEO of Twitch. He has a good presence on Twitter.
01:31 And this sort of a screenshot screams. This is a Google sheet, right? This is a Google sheet. I made this in a Google sheet.
01:39 I made this sort of just to have a nice little visual and it sort of accomplishes that, right? And what we're going to do is we made a copy in our Google drive.
01:50 I realized that there is a one of my pet peeves is he hid the second, he's hidden the second row.
01:59 I think this might have been just for. Used for a little bit, but what I'm going to do, I'm just going to delete it.
02:06 And I don't think we really need it if we have this reference here that do what we showed up. So from what I can tell, it's just this one formula here.
02:16 We can actually go and view view formulas. To see if there's any other formulas here, there's just plus ones. Plus ones here.
02:31 Makes it pretty simple to sort of just put in your, maybe that's his birthday or something. I don't see any other sheets.
02:40 I don't see any other. I see some tea and tea. Three. Maybe it was his some birthday thing, but I'm gonna just change this so that statics, we don't have a formula here.
02:57 We don't need the, I don't think we need the number of the week. So, I'll just try that to May.
03:06 Notice too that there's just a little bit of massaging here that needed to happen. I think this May is five weeks, July is five weeks, and June is three weeks here, but this can be sort of January is five weeks as well, most of them.
03:22 Or four, here's five again, five, four, and December is three weeks. So, you can sort of massage these around if you want to highlight a more one of these months.
03:33 But I think this is pretty cool. We can make a couple of sweet che- very quick changes. What I'm going to do, I'm going to unhide formulas, but I'm also going to- I don't think the grid needs to be shown again.
03:47 If you're looking for a screenshot that screams Google Sheets, then do exactly what Emmet did. But we're going to have these- he has these majority cities, he has years.
04:01 I don't know why he has- you have to fill in the first two and then add plus one. So what we're going to do is we're going to take that and fix that.
04:10 So now all you do is swap out the first year in 1984 for me. And now all of those should be updated to 2024.
04:22 And this- also goes only up to what he needed. We're going to update this and add another, let's say, 40 rows.
04:33 We want all of that. At least if you watched my Memento Mori video, which I can link to in this description, I'm going to live till- 2055 May 5th, 2055 is my death date.
04:48 But we can keep a few years extra here. And also everybody's life expectancy is probably different. So let's add a couple more.
05:01 So one major thing. So one thing we did is we- we deleted that second row. What we can do as well as we can take off this frozen row.
05:09 I don't think we definitely need it. You absolutely can use it if you want to sort of make this as you need it to.
05:19 You'll probably change this birth. Actually mine is right. I'm going to go around here so I would change it here.
05:27 I would probably just take this color and do it again. We want to change this text. I don't like this aerial.
05:36 I like Carla myself, but you might not because it we might need to make it a little bit bigger. That looks great.
05:45 I also want to change this from white. I don't want pure white on the background. I know that you sort of want to in this kind of template or this kind of sheet, you might want a high contrast, but I don't think you need like the highest contrast.
06:01 So I'm going to change this. To a bit of a paper color. FB, FB, FB, F8. And it's just a subtle change, but I think it's going to make a huge difference in coming back this time and time again.
06:18 And we're going to also change the text color. We don't want the blackest black, so we're just going to change it to 444.
06:25 Here, and again, just super simple little color change. We might actually make it a little bit hmmm, what do you call it?
06:36 More, less contrast? Yeah, we're going to make it a little bit yellower. There we go. That's the way we want it.
06:49 So that really shows up. And I'm going to go ahead and I like to sort of, I want to plan this out.
06:56 This is paternity here he's has. But we're going to move that. All the way for another. Some odd years so you can come in here and you can also.
07:12 Deal with this yourself. I'm going to add another thing after paternity, which is the kids move out. Alright, so a few more changes I did is I took it to.
07:26 Oh, I tried to took out with the personal things and I made it general. So if you want to take this spread sheet and use it and I also added this summer holiday all the way through.
07:35 The reason for that is I noticed in Emmett's that he did this naturally. He has these things that he did during the summer.
07:47 And these things that he did during the summer end up being his life much more than a single entry of Yale or some school.
07:57 We can see this. We can also see this sort of summer holiday rhythm to the years. Keep coming up. Kiko ran for two years, but then had a glorious bombing around just before Justin TV.
08:12 And that is the same as summer holidays. We can see his Twitch relaunch summer holiday. The pivot happened over the course of a year that was essentially the school year.
08:24 This could have also been some due to some could, because YC is sort of built around the summer holidays and was for many years.
08:34 So that might have been reason there. But I did want to sort of showcase this rhythm to the year around this summer holiday.
08:45 And then I, I s- stopped it here when when Emmet went into Justin TV, even though, like, you sort of have a hangover for a couple of years if you graduate as 22 from uni, or you go into maybe even a couple more years of uni, or that's, that hangover, you end up having a summer holiday
09:06 . You work. For a year somewhere, you work for another year somewhere, you you don't normally go straight into working all day, every day, forever.
09:15 You have that sort of hangover. So I wanted to showcase that. And maybe an early career here, and I like that you know, there was Justin TV, there was a pivot, he showcased that.
09:26 So I'm gonna. Just go over this a little bit to show that, you know, you probably have a different stuff you're doing here.
09:37 And you might have a different rhythm as well. But here he has paternity when he was, oh, I was, actually this is me.
09:44 Sorry. I changed it to me. I added a couple years. To it, Emmett is just now in his paternity phase.
09:51 I just moved it to my own when I got a kid in 2021. And then I added summer holiday for the kids.
09:59 So even though we get out of our summer holiday rhythm, we end up back in our in the summer holiday rhythm once we have kids and.
10:07 And then we have an empty nest. If you only have one kid, it might this might only be 18 years.
10:12 Oh wait, that's only 13 years. No, well, yeah, 13 minus five because you probably don't have a summer holiday when they're up before they go to school.
10:21 So once they go to school now your your year is based on their summer holiday. And then you know, again, based on how many kids you.
10:27 You have you'll you'll end up with an empty nest at some point empty nest years. And then retire in some particular way.
10:37 So you might also still have summer holiday. Maybe if as a grandparent you're have you're on the grandkids summer holidays.
10:43 So I wanted to make this a little bit better and more. More adjustable for your your own and sort of all of us.
10:53 Emmet did a cool job here and again, it looks and screams and feels like a Google sheet, right? But we want to make it look like, okay, can we really see.
11:03 Our life in and maybe the summer holidays a little too.. In your face and maybe it's should be more shaded towards these shades.
11:14 So let, let me do that. There we go. So this blends in a lot more. I think that summer holiday sort of bursts out because it's also text here.
11:23 And you're going to just like fill in your own text for, for actually interesting things. We can also take down, let's take down this text to gray.
11:33 That really seals the deal here. So it's, it's similar hue similar color as the years that they are, but they are shaded a little differently to really knock out like, hey, this is different.
11:47 I mean. Again, we see this in, in Emmett's life here and we can see this in our own lives that there's going to be some rhythm around this summer, right?
11:58 The, the, the natural rhythm of the earth. We're going to have that rhythm ourselves and our life. So I did want to keep this here to show.
12:08 So that very starkly. Yeah, and maybe we can add better sheets here because I think better sheets came around twenty two.
12:18 Yeah. Here, let's add some better sheets because we definitely need it. I'll use this green actually and white and I think.
12:29 It was April twenty. And now I see why we need this this eight. As we give you in the years, we want April.
12:38 We want to see this first line. So there we go. First week of April, we have. Better sheets. Oof. And we can also put those there.
12:52 It's cool. Oof. And maybe we color this in some other way. For paternity, but it is a whole new life.
13:03 This paternity thing. So yeah, I'm going to look forward to twenty twenty five. Twenty six getting into elementary school and starting my summer holiday all over again.
13:16 Very interesting way to see our lives, right? Hard lives unfold from elementary, middle school, high school, university, take these little gaps, maybe these gaps not gaps, but these timelines are really.
13:29 Innocent of startup life, another three or four years, a sort of a university style learning and maybe our life is filled with those or we end up with one or two that are way more.
13:41 So like my, my, not paternity, but my better sheets has been going for three years and I'm really excited to see more Google sheets, right?
13:50 And see how this parenting thing goes, right? Empty and looking forward to an empty nest and retirement maybe or not looking forward to it.
13:57 Hopefully this has been an interesting video so you can see how we might take someone's Google sheet and make it a little bit better.
14:06 I make it a little more adjustable to our own and see also this very clear. Cool rhythm to the ear.
14:12 Bye.