A similar exercise is lined paper, one year per line. Your life on a page or two. You can vertical-bracket ranges of time, and have multiple columns (even extending the sheet). One nice aspect, is constraint propagation helps a lot in figuring out when things happened. As the years fill in, you get "well, it has to be after X and before Y, and I've already penciled in that summer and that one, so it must have been this one". For greater-than-year precision you can mark a tick, or a blob, or a month letter, but you don't have to. Each time I've done this with someone, there's been something that surprised them.
A similar exercise is lined paper, one year per line. Your life on a page or two. You can vertical-bracket ranges of time, and have multiple columns (even extending the sheet). One nice aspect, is constraint propagation helps a lot in figuring out when things happened. As the years fill in, you get "well, it has to be after X and before Y, and I've already penciled in that summer and that one, so it must have been this one". For greater-than-year precision you can mark a tick, or a blob, or a month letter, but you don't have to. Each time I've done this with someone, there's been something that surprised them.