Journaling When You Hate Writing
you don't have to like it, just want the memories
Most journaling advice quietly assumes you enjoy writing — that given a free evening you’d love to fill a page. 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 assigned by no one.
But not liking writing isn’t the same as not wanting to remember your life. You can want the memories without wanting the essay. That gap is exactly where Little Memory lives. It’s 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 — less writing than a text message, about fifteen seconds. Burned the rice. Dad called, sounded good. First day it felt like fall. That’s not Writing with a capital W; it’s jotting something down, a thing you already do without dread.
There are no style points because there is no audience. Future you is the only reader, and future you will be delighted with the plainest line you’ve got — a year from now, burned the rice brings the whole kitchen back. Fragments count. Lowercase counts. It doesn’t have to be good; it only has to be yours. (If it’s more that the empty page freezes you than that writing bores you, the blank page anxiety page is about that.)
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 — 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 good part was never the writing
Here’s the secret about journaling that the write-every-morning crowd rarely says out loud: the writing is the chore, the reading back is the joy. Little Memory is built around the joy. Your little lines come back to you a week, a month, and a year later — on this day, every year you keep going. You do fifteen reluctant seconds a night, and the app turns it into time travel.
Over 30,000 people — plenty of them not writers, some of them proud non-writers — have kept over 1,000,000 little memories here since 2011. Little Memory was featured by Apple three times, and the whole idea fits in one line: 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 habit explained by someone who promises not to make you write much. And if starting things is easy but keeping them going never is, there’s a page on journaling with ADHD.
