Journaling With ADHD
one line a night, and a reminder that finds you
Little Memory is a one-sentence journal. It has been around since 2011. In the evening a reminder comes to you. You reply with a line about your day, or a photo, and that’s the entry. If you skip a week, nothing piles up while you’re gone.
It isn’t a special ADHD edition of anything. It’s built around the two things that end most journals: you have to remember them, and they ask for more than you have left at the end of a day.
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.
You don’t have to remember it
A reminder arrives at an hour you pick. Replying to it saves the entry. The app doesn’t need to be opened and the journal doesn’t need to be found. The message is already in front of you, and answering it is the whole thing.
Missed days don’t stack up
A paper journal keeps its empty pages. Skip a week and they’re still there when you come back, and a lot of people close the book at that point instead of writing past them.
Here there are no pages to skip. Miss Monday through Thursday, write on Friday, and Friday is a normal entry. Yesterday stays open all through today too, so a night that got away from you can usually still be written down in the morning. There’s more on missing a day.
One sentence is enough
An entry is one sentence about something that happened. Locked myself out again. Good coffee, bad meeting. There are no prompts to answer and no format to get right. On a night when even a sentence is too much, a photo on its own counts.
It takes about fifteen seconds, which is small enough to do when you’re tired.
Your own lines come back
A week later, a month later, a year later, one of those sentences shows up again. Usually it’s about a day you had forgotten having. People here call it a time capsule, and it is what makes the fifteen seconds worth spending.
Over 30,000 people have kept more than 1,000,000 little memories here since 2011, plenty of them in journals with long gaps. The gaps don’t hurt anything.
If you’re picking an app, here’s what to check. If the writing itself is the hard part, there’s a page for that, and one on blank page anxiety. Or look around.
If mornings are the harder end of the day, our other app, Ready Time, tells you when to start each step of getting out the door.
