A New Year's Journal That Makes It Past January
Every January, a lot of people buy a journal. Most of them are blank by March, and the blank part is the problem: an empty notebook from the fourteenth onward is a small daily reminder that you stopped. By spring it’s in a drawer, and next January there’s a new one.
The resolution was fine. The journal was just too big.
Every January 1st, I make the resolution to keep a daily record of my life, good days and bad, so I (and my children) can look back over my life and laugh and cry as we look back over the years. The longest THAT resolution ever lasted was about a week!
App Store Review
Make it one line
Little Memory is a little diary for your iPhone, and the entry is one sentence about today. About fifteen seconds. A reminder arrives in the evening at the hour you pick, you write the line, and the day is kept.
Jan 1. Slept until ten, no regrets. Jan 2. Back to work, the plant survived. Jan 3. Maya tried skating, fell, laughed.
That size fits the evenings that ended last year’s attempt: the tired ones, the busy ones, the ones with nothing obvious to say. “Nothing much, good soup” is a complete entry.
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.
Missing a day isn’t quitting
This is the part the paper journal gets wrong. In Little Memory a missed day is just a quiet one. Nothing piles up, nothing has to be caught up on, and the day after it counts the same as the first of January did. People who’ve kept this going for years skipped plenty of nights. The years are still there.
Next January, it reads itself back
This is what the resolution was actually for. A year from now, on the first of January, the app shows you what you wrote on this date. And on the second, the second. Every day carries last year’s line with it, and the year after that carries two. The old entries come back a week and a month later too, so the first small return arrives before the month is out.
Five years in, an ordinary Thursday hands you four other Thursdays. That’s the whole reason to keep a journal, and it only needs the one line to work.
Starting today
Little Memory is free to download and private by default. It has been running since 2011, with over 1,000,000 memories saved, and Apple has featured it three times. If it’s not January when you’re reading this, that’s fine too: the first of anything is a good day to start, and so is a Tuesday.
If last year’s journal is the thing on your mind, there’s a page on getting back into journaling, and one on the one line a day size and why it’s the one that lasts.
