Journaling When You Hate Writing
you don't have to like it, just want the memories
Plenty of journaling advice assumes you’d love to fill a page, given a free evening. Plenty of people wouldn’t. They don’t like writing, don’t want more of it after a day that already had too much typing in it, and every journal they’ve tried has felt like homework.
That doesn’t mean you don’t want the memories. You can want those without wanting the essay. Little Memory is an iPhone app that only ever asks for a line.
exactly one week ago
Wednesday, Jul 1, 2026
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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
Finally fixed the wobbly chair. Took four minutes.
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.
Journaling the way you’d jot a note
In Little Memory, a day is one plain sentence. That’s less writing than a text message, about fifteen seconds. Burned the rice. Dad called, sounded good. First day it felt like fall. You already jot things down. This is that.
There’s no audience. Future you is the only reader, and future you will be glad of the plainest line you’ve got. A year from now, burned the rice brings the whole kitchen back. Fragments count, and so does lowercase. It doesn’t have to be good. (If it’s more that the empty page freezes you than that writing bores you, that’s blank page anxiety.)
Some days, skip the words entirely
A photo counts as an entry all by itself. Some days the memory is a picture of the dog in the leaves, and no sentence is required. And on writing-averse evenings the entry can happen without even opening the app: a gentle reminder email arrives, and replying to it with however few words saves the day.
I love to blog and journal, but it’s often times a bit of a chore to actually do because I feel obligated to put in at least a little bit of effort. With little memory, all I need to do is enter a sentence or two about something I want to remember about my day (good or bad) and I’m done!
Leanna Lofte, iMore
The reading is the good part
People who don’t like writing still like reading back what they wrote, and Little Memory is built around that half. Your little lines come back a week, a month, and a year later, and then on this day every year you keep going. Fifteen seconds a night is what it costs.
Over 30,000 people have kept over 1,000,000 little memories here since 2011, and plenty of them would not call themselves writers. Little Memory was featured by Apple three times. It’s a journal for people who have a hard time keeping a journal.
See the little tour, or the one line a day page if you want the memories without the writing workshop. And if starting is easy but keeping going never is, there’s journaling with ADHD.
