A Micro-Journaling App for iPhone

Micro-journaling is exactly what it sounds like: journaling, shrunk until it fits inside a real day. A sentence or two about today instead of pages of reflection — written in the time it takes the kettle to boil, and done.

The term is newer than the practice. People were micro-journaling in paper five-year diaries long before it had a name, and Little Memory has been the app version since 2011: over 1,000,000 one-line memories from over 30,000 journalers, featured by Apple three times.

Why the tiny version sticks

Full-size journaling asks for a blank page every night, and the blank page wins almost every time. Micro-journaling flips the ask: a sentence is enough. You can write one sentence tired, one sentence busy, one sentence on the worst day of the month — which is why this is the version of the habit that survives January. In Little Memory it takes about fifteen seconds, and there are no prompts to answer first.

And a year of one-liners quietly adds up to a little time capsule: 365 days of your life, kept. There’s more on the habit itself on the one line a day page.

The notes-app problem

Most micro-journaling advice says to just use your notes app, and for the writing half that works fine. It’s the keeping half that falls down: those little notes never find you again. They sit in a list, unread, and after a few weeks it gets hard to feel what they’re for.

Little Memory does the looking back for you. Each time you return, it brings back what you wrote a week ago, a month ago, and a year ago — the first happy coincidences arrive while the habit is still young, and the journal reaches further back with every year you add.

Built for the tiny habit

• The reminder comes to you. A nightly email, and replying to it saves the day’s line.
• A photo counts as an entry. Some days the sentence is a picture.
• The little stats. Current and longest streaks, your most used words, and how your emotions have shifted over time.
• Everything is findable. Search all your years in seconds.
• Nothing gets lost. Automated nightly backups to Dropbox or Google Drive, and you can export everything at any time.

Private by default

One-sentence entries tend to be the honest ones, so your journal is always private by default. No social media login required, and support comes straight from the developer.

Curious how it compares to the bigger journaling apps? See the comparisons, or take the little tour.