A Mood Journal in Your Own Words
Most mood tracking apps start with a scale: pick the face, slide the slider, rate the day one to five. It’s quick, and the charts that grow out of it are satisfying to look at.
But a rating flattens things. A day that held both wonderful and terrible news becomes a shrug in the middle of the scale, as if the two canceled out — when really that was one of the big days. And a year of ratings, reread later, can tell you that February was a three, without a word about what February was.
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
Peaches at the stand. Bought far too many.
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.
Write the sentence, keep the feeling
Little Memory, an iPhone app, turns the order around. You don’t rate your day — you write one sentence about it, in your own words, about fifteen seconds’ worth. Nervous all morning, fine by noon. Good news about the apartment. Tired but not sad. The app reads the feeling from what you wrote: sentiment analysis turns your sentences into emotion trends over time, so the mood chart still shows up. It’s just built from something real.
Your most used words become their own quiet chart, too — a different kind of mood data: what, and who, you actually talk about when you talk about your days.
The part a mood chart can’t do
A slider, reread in a year, is still a slider. A sentence, reread in a year, is a memory. Little Memory brings your lines back to you — a week later, a month later, and on this date every year after — so the same fifteen seconds that feeds the mood trends is also building a little time capsule of your life. Two keepsakes for the price of one sentence.
The habit side stays gentle: a nightly reminder email arrives, and replying to it saves the entry. Streaks if you enjoy them, and yesterday stays writable all through today if a night gets away from you. Everything is private by default, searchable, backed up nightly to Dropbox, and yours to export anytime — over 1,000,000 sentences kept here since 2011, by over 30,000 journalers, featured by Apple three times.
It’s a little therapeutic in that moment. But then it will remind you in 90 days… or a year from then, and it really helps me put into perspective the cycles of my mental state, because I can be “wow, 3 months ago I was going through it”.
Jarvis Johnson, Sad Boyz podcast
If you’re coming from a tracker
Plenty of people arrive here from icon-based mood apps, usually the ones who kept typing more and more into the little optional notes field. There are honest comparisons with Daylio and DailyBean — each says who should stick with the tracker, too. If the tracking was suggested by a therapist, there’s a page about that as well. Or start from the beginning with the little tour.
