How to Start Journaling
and keep it going
Most journaling attempts don’t stumble on day one. Day one is lovely: a new notebook, big intentions, a long first entry. It’s week two that goes quiet, when the blank page starts asking for more than the evening has left. The journal was too big. Here’s a smaller version.
Your memories come back
Write one line tonight and that’s your journaling for the day. Seven days on it turns up again, and after that it keeps turning up.
- a week later
- a month
- three months
- six months
- a year
- every year after
little memory
now
Exactly 1 year ago
Walked the long way home for no reason.
Have it come to you at an hour you pick, or leave notifications off and find them waiting the next time you open the app.
1. Let one sentence count
Forget pages. One sentence counts as journaling. A sentence fits inside any day, tired or busy or sick or traveling, so there’s always room for it. This is sometimes called micro-journaling, and it’s the kindest place to start.
2. Let the journal come to you
A new journal is easier to keep when it can lean on something you already do. Tie your sentence to a moment that already happens every night: getting into bed, plugging in the phone. Little Memory, an iPhone app, goes a step further: the reminder comes to you in the evening, so the journal does the remembering.
3. Write what happened
It’s tempting to aim for reflection: lessons, gratitude, growth. Let all of that go. Just put down one specific thing from the day: the soup you made, the call from your sister, the parking ticket. Ordinary and specific is perfect. The meaning shows up later, on its own, when the line comes back to you.
4. Let your old days visit
Most journals fade because nobody rereads them. The notebook sits on the shelf holding everything and showing nothing. Little Memory reads it back to you instead. As you write, it brings back what you wrote a week ago, a month ago, and a year ago. Tonight’s line is a small gift for your future self, and the first ones come back within the week, while the habit is still new. That’s what a daily memory journal is for.
You helped me take some of the most precious and special years of my life and remember them forever — and to have something recorded basically every day since I was 17 is such a gift. I look back on memories from years ago and surprise myself with how much I’ve grown.
J., reader letter
5. Be gentle about missed days
You’ll miss some. Everyone does, and it doesn’t undo a thing. A journal holding most of your days is a lovely thing to have, and it waits for you without complaint. Little Memory keeps streaks if you enjoy them (a missed day does reset the counter), but nothing scolds and nothing is lost: tonight’s one line picks up right where you left off.
Start with tonight’s sentence
Little Memory has been doing these five things since 2011, with over 1,000,000 one-line memories from over 30,000 people, and Apple has featured it three times. When the reminder arrives tonight, write one sentence about today. That’s how it starts.
Want to look around first? Take the little tour, or see how it compares to other journaling apps. And if this isn’t your first attempt, there’s a gentler page about getting back into journaling, where the gap is fine, and one for the drawer of unfinished journals, if there’s a few of them by now.
