Journaling With ADHD

for the notebooks that stopped in February

There’s usually a small collection somewhere. The nice notebook with eleven pages filled. The app you were serious about for a week. The planner from the year you were going to do this properly. Every one of them started well — which is the part that stings, because it means the wanting was never the problem.

If you have ADHD, the advice you get about journaling tends to assume the hard part is deciding to write. Most of the time it isn’t. The hard part is the journal being somewhere else, at a moment you didn’t think of it, asking for more than you have right then.

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.

1. a week later
2. a month
3. three months
4. six months
5. a year
6. 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.

The remembering is the expensive part

A journal in a drawer is a journal you have to keep in your head, and there’s no room. So Little Memory doesn’t wait to be remembered. It’s an iPhone app, and the reminder comes to you. A quiet reminder arrives in the evening, and replying to it saves your entry for the day. No finding anything, no deciding when.

That’s most of it, honestly. The reminder comes to you and the entry is one reply long.

If your mornings go the same way, that’s what our other app is for. Ready Time tells you when to start each step, so getting out the door isn’t something you have to hold in your head either.

There’s nothing to catch up on

Notebooks accumulate debt. Skip a week and the empty pages are still sitting there, needing to be filled or turned past, and the pile of them is usually what ends it.

Little Memory has no pages. A day you didn’t write is simply a day that isn’t there, and there’s no stack of them waiting. You can miss four days and write on the fifth, and the fifth is a perfectly normal entry. Yesterday also stays writable all through today, so a night that slipped past you is usually still reachable in the morning. (More on the day you miss — the day that tends to decide these things.)

Fifteen seconds, and no shape to get right

An entry is one sentence about something that happened. Locked myself out again. Fixed the wobbly chair. Good coffee, bad meeting. No prompts to answer, no mood wheel to work through, no format that can be done wrong. A photo counts as an entry all by itself on the nights when even a sentence is too much.

Fifteen seconds is short enough that it doesn’t need a good day, a quiet room, or the version of you that has energy left.

The looking back is the good part

Here’s what keeps it going when nothing else did: your lines come back. A week later, a month later, a year later, one of your own plain sentences shows up and hands you a day you’d completely lost — something arriving already written, from someone who knew you’d forget.

Little Memory has been quietly running since 2011. It was built by someone with a drawer of things that stopped in February, for the plain reason that no other journal ever stuck. Over 30,000 people have kept more than 1,000,000 little memories here since, most of them in journals with gaps all through. The whole idea fits in a line: a journal for people who have a hard time keeping a journal.

If writing itself is the part you don’t enjoy, there’s a page for journaling when you hate writing. If it’s the empty screen, try blank page anxiety. Or take the little tour and see the whole quiet thing.