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Memento Mori | The Death Dashboard

About this Tutorial

In this tutorial I go from raw data to a full formed dashboard. In this particular case we're looking at the number of weeks someone might have left to live. A bit of stoic motivation, part baroque style. You'll see how I look for inspiration in the Memento Mori medallion and also in images representative of  "Memento Mori" then I use those colors in the images to make this dashboard.  

In addition to that we build an hour glass for the number of weeks we've lived and have left to live. This Hourglass of Life might be something you can incorporate into other kinds of dashboards. Don't be afraid to build visual representations of your data to easily see what's going on.

Featured Formulas

Video Transcript

00:00 Hello, welcome. So this is one of those videos where we're gonna start off with absolutely nothing, almost, well just an idea.
00:06 And we're gonna walk through building a dashboard. You're gonna see everything that I do, all of the decisions that I make, the sort of resources I make, and resources I get see, and look through.
00:19 And basically we're gonna, Build this memento mori, this the death dashboard as I call it. Recently I found out that there's someone who keeps motivation at the forefront of their activities by seeing literally how many days left they have to live.
00:38 And I thought, oh, this would be a cool Build this memento mori, this would be a cool build. Google sheet, I thought dashboard.
00:44 And I created this data first and I've been sitting here for a couple of weeks with it and been like, this really needs to look better.
00:52 So we're going to make it look better in this video. We're going to walk through everything. I have literally prepared nothing.
00:59 So get ready. And walk through this. We'll go through what it is, what the data is and what we need to display.
01:07 And then we're going to go search for other memento mori sort of iconography. And we're going to see, you know, where this might take us.
01:16 You might think original, like without me saying anything. Told you like we're going to create a dashboard for death. You're going to think black.
01:26 And we might end up there. We might end up with sort of a dark mode kind of dashboard or a darkish grayish tints.
01:36 But let's see, maybe this becomes, you know, a light kind of lightweight and light because this is really meant for motivation.
01:46 This is not meant in any really bad way. This is actually meant to sort of motivate you through each day and each week and, and say, you know I can literally see my date of death here.
02:00 But let me walk through the data. First, then we will get through going through creating this kind of dashboard. And we'll see, you'll see also share, I will share, and you'll see my sort of theories along this path.
02:14 And if you diverge or disagree with me in any way, or you see some other inspiration, or you have some other sort of, trinkets, maybe you're into some kind of skeleton looking things or something you can make those decisions along the way that make a difference in the end result.
02:31 And we'll see the end result at the end. I literally don't know what the end is. I have no other tab here.
02:36 There's this, just sheet one. I just started this with some data. So we don't know what we're gonna get to.
02:42 Yeah. All right. Let's get into the data. All right. I put my birth date here May 21st, 1984. I got the life expectancy in years based on literally just Googling for it.
02:57 But here's the thing. This life expectancy 71.2 was based in 1984, I think. I think I found some, the piece, this piece of information, life expectancy from 1984.
03:13 So if I was born in 1984, this is what my life expectancy would have been. But, over the last, okay, maybe over.
03:22 39 years we have seen many updates in, in, in in, in health and medical, right? So this life expectancy actually will probably increase and probably should be more.
03:38 I know, and also based on, this is just me filling in this number. If you have some pre conditions or some genetic things that are maybe increase your life expectancy, like my grandfather lived past 80 and my dad is probably going to probably live past 80.
03:57 They have their health problems, but between seven, they're probably not on death's door at the end. Age of 70. Yet could be, you know tragedy strikes everywhere.
04:10 So what I did is I just took this life expectancy again, we can change this at all. You can change this for what you determine your life expectancy to be, but I just put in 71.2 because it was the life expectancy when I was born.
04:25 For someone born in 1984. Alright, I just times 52 to get the number of weeks, this is 71.2 years is 3,702 weeks.
04:40 I think if you do 80. And we do equals 80 times 52. We get something, yeah, around 4,000. There's a popular book right now called like 4,000 weeks and it's sort of the entire, your entire duration of your life is around 4,000 weeks.
04:58 So I was actually surprised when I, I knew that and then I saw 33,000. 700 weeks. I was like, oh, that's not, that's not a lot.
05:06 Then what I did is I just took the date of birth. I made sure that this date is actually formatted correctly for Google Sheets so that this is an actual number.
05:18 So we can actually see this is a weird tangent, but there are. These numbers, these dates let's format it as plain text is 30,000, eight, two, three.
05:30 This is the number of days since January 1st, 1900. I think this is the way that Google Sheets bases dates.
05:39 So you can do math. And so what I did, I just took the number of. Of weeks I multiplied it by seven.
05:45 I know this is probably a very poor, it's a very rudimentary way to do this. You could probably figure out leap years and stuff in some other way, but I just took this number of weeks times seven to see the number of days, then added it to this underlying number, which is this May 21st, 1984.
06:03 And I found the date of my death, May 5th, 2055, which completely randomly is quite an interesting number because it's five, five, five, five.
06:17 Very interesting number and I sort of am keeping it there. Again, there are many ways we can change this. We can change this life expectancy to be 80 or 81 depending on modern science if the life expectancy is greater.
06:33 But I just thought, wow, this date is such a perfect, perfectly created date, right? Five, five, five, five. 20, five, six, seven, eight.
06:44 55 May 5th, 2055, right? The fifth month of the year, the fifth day of the fifth month of the 50-50 year of the millennium or something, right?
06:56 And then I have today. So I'm just using equals today. This is a standard little formula that just updates every day.
07:04 Today's May 15th, 2023. So tomorrow this will be May 16th, 2023. And quite literally, I'm just taking D2, which is the date of death and minusing it from today.
07:19 Again, these are underlined. There are, there are numbers under sort of underneath here that Google sheets can do this. It's addition with.
07:26 So we now know we have 11,679 days left to live. This is very interesting. Right, we can see actually how many days we've also lived.
07:39 If we want days lived, which would be. We were today minus the day we're born. So I've lived 14,238 days.
07:54 We can change this number to a number, take out the dot, the decimals there and say, wow, I've lived 14,000.
08:05 238 days. Is that right? 14,238 by 365. Oops. Is that really? Oops. We have an error because of this. Hmm, 14,238.
08:26 Yep, 39 years. Hmm. Celebrating 39 years soon. So that's 39 years is 14,238 days and days left. Less than that.
08:38 I am over the hill. I am midlife. Exactly. So, what? Do we want to do here? What is this momentum?
08:48 We want to see, you know, 11,679. We want to see this number tick down. We might not include the days lived.
08:58 I'm going to delete that. Just so we don't. We can have it on the data sort of data sheet. But how should we?
09:05 Show this. We can, we can do Memento Mori. And see, there's this sort of style. Look at some images here.
09:16 There's definitely a skull image. There is always this sort of handwritten, right? There's an hourglass imagery here. And I, you know what?
09:27 Funny enough, I do see a lot of shadows, a lot of black and white. But I also see a lot of brown.
09:32 I see also this sort of silverish. There is a coin in the, the Stoics have especially with Ryan Holiday and talking about Stoicism and Memento Mori is one of his sort of phrases that he uses.
09:44 He has a coin. Now, coin could be bronze, silver, gold. In this way it has always has a skull on it.
09:53 And it has this words, Memento Mori, but it also has, yeah hourglass and some kind of a fiery potion or something.
10:05 . Oh yeah, this is actually this. This is the daily stoic Memento Mori medallion. Carry them in your pocket or remind you the phrase Memento Mori is literally, remember you will die.
10:21 You are man, right? You are a human. You are a person and you will die. There will be an end to your life, right?
10:26 Everybody dies. Yeah, so we got all this black imagery. We have some a little bit of blue, this sort of grayish, you know, darkish, blackish blue.
10:36 We have very stark. But here this is a really nice flowery ornamentate ornamentation ornamentation. Yeah, this is a movie. Again, has dark, has white text, dark background.
10:57 Remember this darkness, right? Exists dark and light. But I'm wondering, is there something else here? Or, Do we just go stark black?
11:08 So, let's look at this. Let's try stark black sheet. We have days left. Let's start there with this days left.
11:20 We're just gonna grab it from here. So we have days left. Days. Call it days. This is gonna be a dashboard.
11:31 So we don't need extra extra stuff. So we actually just wanna create, just want to delete. Nope. I don't wanna one column thing.
11:43 I press the wrong button. Let's go back to the sheet to I want. I go tiny sheets, delete. Oh, this always, delete rows and columns outside data.
11:52 So I just want a little bit, a few things. Let's see what we got. So the first thing I wanna do.
12:00 Yeah, let's just add another column to the right. It's easier to add these than go and delete each and everything.
12:07 Also here we got days left. Where can I make this white background black? And it's okay. Sort of has the exact same problems before.
12:21 We have this sort of high contrast. I sort of, I just want to, do something with these other colors. I like this grayness.
12:36 I like this brown. This white is not white. So let's take a screenshot of just these bones and see if we can get some of these colors in.
12:46 HTML, colors from image. We're just going to upload this and get it. Okay, so we have this, this white is not white.
12:56 It is very much a yellowish. That's cool. So let's try that with the text. We'll just add it here in our custom.
13:06 And then we want this, This black is not an interesting black. Maybe we can get a grayer one. Yeah, this one, four, seven.
13:19 Let's add that to make it the background. Okay, cool. We'll, let's, Let's view, show, let's not show grid lines. We can also get this gray not gray, this brown.
13:37 Let's grab this brown. What we might do here, it almost looks brown in this background, right? Might do border here.
13:49 Let's try a border, a really thick border, underline it. And then we're gonna add a custom dark brown. Let's see.
14:03 But that might, we can't see it. There it is. Alright! Interesting. We're gonna do, the same thing here. Alright, so we have this sort of brownish background.
14:15 This text is not gonna work. Should we two, oh, that looks nice. I can make this huge. Yeah. We need to make this way bigger.
14:26 Because we need to, this is a dashboard. Alright, we're gonna be able to glance at this. We might even keep this as like a link on our desktop.
14:37 We're gonna wanna, come back to this time and time again. Let's do 50. Oof. That looks cool, but we can, probably do better.
14:49 Let's look at some different fonts. Let's look at more fonts and see. We have all these scripts, fonts. We always have handwriting.
14:59 It always seems to be handwriting in the sort of memento-mori world. And what might look sort of more classical? This, Great vibes.
15:10 Let's look at that. But I like this sort of script here too. Nothing too sort of dainty, right? It needs to look like, ooh, this mark script looks nice and it's readable too.
15:25 It's very easy to read. Some of these are very hard to read. Like, right, this, Burishi and it's very hard to read.
15:32 We want to see this at a glance. This Italiano is hard to read. Pinyon script, it's very skewed. We don't want something cute like this Ringi Beanie.
15:46 Shadows into light too. I think this is a little too, clumped together. We want something a little more this Rancho definitely looks like the old west, not like like we're going to do actually a lot of people dying in the old west, right?
16:04 Oh, this LaBelle Aurora looks cool. Alright, let's look at those. Let's see what what did we add? We added one that I like, this Cauchinscript.
16:14 Interesting, right? There was another one. Grand Vibes, the numbers look pretty cool, but I don't like that skew, I don't know why.
16:25 And for numbers, what do you really want this script? Let's see, let, Ah, that's not so bad. Let's actually increase it even more.
16:36 Sort of like that. But it looks a little too, hmmm, yeah, a little too dainty, right? Like, too close to what it was that Comic Sans, alright?
16:51 That looks so close. We don't want that. Yeah, this looks a little too Baroque, I think? Is that the word?
17:03 I don't know. We can find something better. This Cauchins script, let's see. Is that it? What? It's called Cauchins. Cauchins?
17:15 Oh, that's a pretty interesting word. Cauchins. Oh wait, this is literally K-A-U-S-H-A-N. So how would you pronounce that? Cauchins? Cauchins?
17:26 Cauchins? Sounds like Cauchins. Alright, I'm gonna keep it just because of that. Wonderful play of words. And we have this shadow that is this brown?
17:37 Or not shadow, it's a it's a grid line. But I don't like it just that tiny little grid line. What I wanna do is actually go up to extensions.
17:48 I'm gonna add on, I'm gonna get an add-on. I'm gonna get button styles. We're gonna create a button really quickly.
17:57 Button styles. There it is. We'll, Install, Yes, I want everyone to use this. Y'all. We'll see what it does in a hot second.
18:13 Okay, I think it's in here. Okay, so what we're gonna do is take a three, We need three by three grid.
18:20 So we're gonna, Let's do another one here. We need three by three. Give us three, three by, three. There we go.
18:32 Gonna go to extensions, Oh, it's not even here yet. Mmm. Okay, we finally have it. We have button styles, but what we need is a three by three grid.
18:45 So that's this right here. We're gonna do extensions button styles, show sidebar. We come over here. And in one click, we're gonna be able to set as a custom style.
18:57 What it does is it creates a shadow underneath this button. So, What it does is it gives us a, Let's just show us this background, the different color.
19:17 And, Let's add some more rows underneath. We're gonna just color these differently. And we're gonna definitely come back to this brown.
19:27 This, I don't know what this We want this dark brown. Oof. And do we want this This brown. Now we want this sort of bonus, right?
19:42 And maybe the bone color might be different. Mmm. You can do that. Now we have, hmm. Let's put that in the days left.
19:55 11,679. I know it's very subtle. This sort of brown background, this sort of button on the back. But like, I think it adds something really cool.
20:06 And we can even copy this some other times if we want to make, I think this bigger or smaller. Wow.
20:17 This is looking pretty cool, right? So I'm thinking something else here sort of as a spark of imagination here. We have these days left.
20:26 We might want to put them that word down here, days left. Put it in this shadow sort of box area.
20:36 Oops. Just make that a little bit bigger. Do you want this caution script? We want it to 20 and center it.
20:46 Couldn't even make it a little bit bigger. Yeah. Looks cool, right? Yeah. So we have these 11,679 days left. What is that in weeks?
21:00 Maybe we can create another thing here. We might want to see it in, I want to select everything and paste.
21:12 Next it here. Weeks left. We're just gonna take this equals, this divided by 7, right? 1,668 weeks left. Oof. This is gonna really make you like, oh, make these weeks count, right?
21:31 I can keep this. Let's gap a little bit down. We have some other things. We have the date of death here.
21:38 We can probably add that as well. Let's just do this all again. Day of death. And just do equals here.
22:01 So we can always come back to this data later and change it. And then our dashboard has changed, right? Oh, it's 56,000.
22:07 That's cool. We have to format this format this to a date. There we go. 555 2055. Cool. Let's change these gaps all to be the same size.
22:23 And actually I want to put this all in one viewport. So let's make this a little bit smaller. We're just changing these gaps.
22:33 So that it sort of looks. There we go. But I want to do something else with this visualization. I want to see, okay, 1,668.
22:45 What would that look like? Because there was this other imagery in our memento mori sort of research. Those images we looked at.
22:57 . And it was this hourglass, right? And we also have days lived now, right? Days lived and days left. So could we show that in some sort of hourglass kind of looking thing?
23:11 . Would we? Should we? Let's add some. We'll see if we can get more rows down here and see what we can do.
23:16 Like this is a total test if you're watching this and thinking this is gonna work off right off the bat.
23:22 We might, it might not work. But I'm gonna take this B through J. See it actually through I. Just these two because I might do something different with this day of death.
23:32 We might not have it. Three across three seems pretty good, but let's some. I'm gonna merge the cells. And then I'm actually gonna add another 20 rows.
23:46 . Don't know if the math is gonna work out here, but let's take. How many were one, two, three, four, oh, it's.
23:54 Doesn't matter how many across.. We want to do this sort of weeks left.. Let's do that. That looks like a lot.
24:07 . Let's merge all of that. Okay, so this is one block. I'm gonna put into here equals our EPT repeat. Text to repeat, I'm gonna put in.
24:20 . It's just a square. This sort of brown squares. Okay. And then number of repetitions is going to be weeks left.
24:30 And let's see what that does. Let's see if we can. Is that all every all of them? Okay, let's. I want to expand this a little bit.
24:43 . Okay, that's still not enough. That's, that's okay. We're okay. Still not enough. Okay, we need how many across this is one, two, three, four, five.
24:55 10, 20, 30, 30-ish across. So in order to get like a thousand, six hundred and sixty-eight, thirty is gonna be five, what?
25:06 Oh, we added an extra six there. Divided by thirty. Fifty-five. Okay, so we need around fifty-five rows if we want to do it there.
25:15 Oh, okay. Let's add twenty more rows. I think that's it. We can decrease the size of that. Okay, that's, that's how many, Week, because we have this space up here, we know it's, That's how many weeks we have left.
25:36 Wow. That's it. Okay, let's do the same. I want to do ten to fifty-four, so let's just add sixty. Make this sort of like an hourglass, right?
25:47 And, gonna go right from there. To here, this will be filled up. More, we're gonna merge all those cells. And now, instead of, Rept to F5, which is weeks left, We're going to do, Back our sheet one, days lift.
26:13 So this is how many, Lift. Why is there an error? Oh, I have two equal signs. That's why. What? Oh, we need to, Oh, that's it?
26:30 What? Is that it? No, there it goes. Okay, now we have, We can probably make, This is probably gonna be nicer to look at if it's less big.
26:44 What is going on? This is not doing well. It's taking a lot of processing power. Oh my god. Yep. Alright, let's, This is not enough.
27:01 Oh, because it's days. Sorry. We need to do this divided by seven. That's too many. Almost, Did that wrong? There we go.
27:11 Now we have That's however many. We need ten. There we go. That's it. And let's change this back to ten.
27:25 And this is our hourglass, right? This is the weeks we have left. This is the weeks we have lived. And each week one will drop here and one will go here.
27:35 We can maybe do like, Like one here to say this is the week we're in. So we do f5 minus one.
27:44 This might be an interesting little note equals, I'm just gonna put, Actually, just need that. That's square. Same, square. That's this week.
28:03 Alright, that's pretty cool. Right?. You can probably get rid of some of these, but, Nice rudimentary little hourglass that actually is going to work, right?
28:14 Because all of this will update as this d- data updates. As today changes as the days left go less and the days left go more, we're now gonna have this hourglass.
28:28 We can see, here. That's our entire life. That's the week we have right now. And, this, go. Wow. That's pretty mental, right?
28:42 Let's see if we, oh yeah. Centering it up. It's definitely better. So here we see, ooh, this is exciting. You know what else we can do is actually we can turn this hourglass with, we actually, make it the shape.
29:00 Let's add this border. But let's add the border, sort of this bonus color we had before, right? There. Actually, we don't even need all, we just need the left, the right, the top.
29:18 And then the bottom one we need, the left, right, and the bottom. So we get this sort of, Getting sort of weird, hourglass.
29:28 Looking figure. And we can sort of keep it as an open-ended thing. Or we can yeah, take. This. Do, We need bottom and left.
29:43 And then here, We need bottom and right. Oof. And then we need to add one robot. Oh, hello. Yeah, that'll be better.
30:03 It takes a little bit of intricacy, right? But I think it's gonna make it look cool, right? Top end, right?
30:13 There we go. That's our center of that. Alright. There we go. That's our glass. You can sort of see that shape.
30:22 Whoo! That's exciting. Days left, weeks left, our glass, our week just going through there. This is very memento mori. Day of our death.
30:32 We can fix this too to I don't like this sort of one on the right here.. Maybe we put this on the bottom so we don't see it or we put it at the top in the center.
30:44 I don't think we didn't do that very elegantly. Maybe we add another another stat here that we want to look at instead of just days left, weeks left.
30:55 Maybe we do want to see those.. The day of death with something else. Ah, so I figured something out here is we can add a little bit more room once we have deleted this other column, right?
31:15 . We have a little bit more extra room here and I think we can do. A really nice sign here. So instead of having just a memento mori as the title of this thing, we can actually put memento mori here as a word here, right?
31:33 Memento. There. And actually make it, Slide. Yup. Line up like this. In the center. Let's choose our font. We might want a different font here, actually.
31:50 Let's look at this labelle again. It's interesting, right? Memento mori. Let's look at that great vibes. Not really vibing right now.
32:05 That we can do a little bit less. Mmm. Doesn't, it doesn't look like it's popping off the screen, right? And maybe that's sort of the point, right?
32:18 We get a blood red. We like, sort of that. Oof. That's a little, ugh. Like this sort of, oh, this yellow works well.
32:31 But let's change that font again to this caution. Mmm, interesting. Okay, so I made it a little less gaps. The gaps a little less big.
32:46 But this Memento Mori is not really doing well for me. I sort of want these on separate lines so I can do something different with each of the Memento and the Mori.
32:56 So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna un, Had that merged. I'm gonna unmerge it. This three should be the same size as seven.
33:07 There we go. But we're gonna take this. We have two lines now. But we're gonna do across here. We're gonna merge, those.
33:20 And then, merge this. So we have two lines here. Momento and then Morrie. But we can do it right now.
33:30 We're gonna do, this yellow. Use caution script. We're gonna go back to what we had before. But we can use these differently, right?
33:40 We can say this one 55. We're gonna do it in the center. And this one, we can do 45 a little bit less.
33:51 Hmm. We'll use this two different fonts here. Might look interesting. Mmm. We can even, Ooh, that might look cool. This four and this eight are gonna be the same.
34:09 We're gonna make this a little bit bigger. Hmm. Interesting. Let's, Hmm. That looks cool, right? I'm sorry to liking that.
34:27 All caps. Could also do. Let's go back. Actually, that looks great. Memento. All out. Let's, this is, is on this side.
34:42 We're gonna, what is this called? Align it to the left a little bit. And actually bring it down just a little bit.
34:53 Ooh, that looks cool. Make it the same size. Yeah. That looks nice. Here's your day of death. We can input that up to the top.
35:06 Hmm. I don't like that this, this one is the one. Let's do this. Let's merge this. Ah, that looks better.
35:19 Already, that's it. That's all we needed to do. But this, This five and this nine should be the same. Can decrease it.
35:27 There we go. But this momento could actually be up here. And let's move that up. Nice. Some more is being cut off, right?
35:38 You see that? Hmm. Think then we can take this bottom one and increase it. There we go. That looks better.
35:49 I just added the, I just changed the alignment to the top here so it gets it off the bottom. That's cool.
35:56 And now we have our day of death, our days left, our weeks. It's left. We have an hourglass that is in the, this is this week.
36:06 We can even increase this, I think, a little bit. Let's, There we go. In our sort of stable. This is our little week.
36:16 This is one week. And this is the weeks we've lived. This is weeks we have left to, live day of death.
36:24 So now we're not like thinking about age, right? So that's one of the weirdest things for me. So I didn't really like seeing this life expectancy 71.2.
36:32 I just sort of didn't want to think about that. But I wanted to think about life in a different way, right?
36:37 Number of weeks left. Number of days left. We're gonna see this deep move close. Oh, sir, and closer. We're gonna see this number of days go less and less.
36:45 We're gonna see this hourglass literally get less and less as the weeks go by, right? Oh my God. This is gonna be really, this is interesting, right?
36:57 Hopefully you enjoyed seeing going from just this data. He used a little bit of HTML color from this sort of g- bonish.
37:09 I wanted something with less contrast than just black and white. And we found this really cool image. We took the hex codes and made it here.
37:17 I like that this brown is around this sort of de-grace. Being right, right. But this black isn't the blackest black.
37:27 And this white isn't the white. And we made a working hourglass of the number of weeks we have left to live.
37:41 Pretty cool. Thanks for watching.