Personal countdowns full#
Personal countdowns plus#
Personal countdowns free#
Personal countdowns mac#

Personal countdowns mac#

I am on a Mac and there is a tiny app called Days Left that displays the remaining countdown days in the dock. I also wanted a desktop clock for when I was not online. You enter your last day and from thence on it will show you how many days until then. There is a Google gadget that sits on your iGoogle homepage, called not surprisingly Countdown Clock.

Personal countdowns free#

To turn that end date into a current “days left” you can use one or more free countdown clocks. I sure hope I have a really really good time the night before. I am suppose to die on New Years Day (January 1), 2031. For me the estimated last day of my life turned out to be easily remember. Then you go to the Date Duration Calculator to transform the remaining time into a specific date.

Personal countdowns plus#

So I’ll stick the less exact but more trustworthy average age.Įither way you go, you take your expected life span in years and starting from your birthday figure out how many years plus days you have left.

I believe they could make this adjustments with sufficient data, but I don’t believe these websites have the proper scientific judgement or data to do so. There are various websites that purport to make that calculation but I don’t believe them. The other way is to amend that basic figure with the plus and minus of your personal lifestyle, known illnesses and family health history. This will tell you the age at which statisticians expect you will die. To get that figure all you need to do is go the standard Life Expectancy Table (PDF), like the ones published by Medicaid. One is to take the general average life-span for a guy my age in the US.

My first step was to figure out my expected longevity. I figured that mounting an automatic personal countdown sign should be pretty easy, and something that others might want to do as well. A wasted day would reveal its loss in the empty lower count the next day. Then I would try to use my blog to record what how I spent the day to keep me honest. What I wanted was a great big flashing sign that would show up on my computer and shout out to me how many days I had remaining. Indeed, it might help me decide which ones are most important, which is the harder assignment. My hope was that a reckoning of my numbered days would help me account for how I spend each precious 24 hours, and to focus my attention and energy on those few tasks and projects I deem most important to me. I decided to take the idea of number days seriously, and to revisit my earlier experience of counting down my remaining time on this lovely mortal plane. He recounted how invigorating this knowledge was, because while he could never be certain that number was true, it did help him prioritize his choices and defuse his procrastinations. If he has less than 5 big things he can do, what will they be?Īnother friend, a musician, told me about a recurring dream he had in which he could see the exact number of days left in his life.

So, he asks himself, how many 5 years do I have left? He can count them on one hand even if he is lucky. From moment of inception to the last good-riddance, a book, a campaign, a new job, a start-up will take 5 years to play through. Five years is what he says any project worth doing will take. My friend Stewart Brand, who is now 69, has been arranging his life in blocks of 5 years. Even with increasing longevity there is not enough time to do all that I want. Like a lot of people in middle age my late-night thoughts bend to contemplations about how short my remaining time is. But I did live with a very conscious countdown toward the final day I remember that last day very well. The short version is that what I decided to do in my last 6 months surprised me, and that living with only 180 days in front of me turned out to be harder than I thought. (An almost biblical scene I encountered in my travels.)

Personal countdowns full#

I’ve told the full story of that curious mission on the very first episode of This American Life, the public radio storytelling hit, 10 years ago, so I won’t go into further detail because you can hear my account on this streaming audio file from the NPR site. I was in perfect health and in the middle of a ten-year round the world trip, so this interruption was unexpected and strange. According to this assignment my job was to live as if I had only 6 months left to live. When I was about 29 years old I got a spiritual “assignment” on an Easter morning in the old city of Jerusalem.