A Time Capsule Journal
that opens a little every day
A time capsule is a lovely promise: put something small away today, and let a future person — a future you — find it. The trouble with the buried-box kind is the waiting. It opens once, decades out, and most of them are simply forgotten.
A time capsule journal keeps the promise but shrinks the wait. You seal one small line about today, and instead of one far-off opening, it opens a little at a time: what you wrote comes back to you a week later, a month later, and then on this date every year after. “Time capsule” isn’t our word, by the way — it’s the word people who use Little Memory keep arriving at on their own.
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
Power out all evening. We ate cold noodles by candlelight.
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.
Sealing takes fifteen seconds
Tonight’s contribution, in the iPhone app, is one sentence about today: the soup that finally came out right, the song in the car, the thing you’re quietly hoping for. About fifteen seconds, a photo if you like. A gentle reminder email arrives each evening, and replying to it seals the day’s line — no ceremony, no blank page.
The openings never stop
The first opening comes just a week in, while the habit is still new. Then the month one. Then the anniversaries begin: open the app on any day and there’s this date in every year you’ve kept — by your fifth year, a little stack of yous, sitting together on one screen. People here call the ones that land at exactly the right moment happy coincidences. (There’s a whole page on the on this day side of this.)
That’s the part a buried box never gets right: a time capsule is only as good as its opening, and this one opens on the ordinary days too.
A daily time capsule, simple and elegant, a true pleasure to use and remember life’s little memories.
Jamie Wu, Apple iTunes Store Engineer
Safekeeping, for a capsule’s whole point is keeping
Little Memory has been holding little time capsules since 2011 — over 1,000,000 memories from over 30,000 journalers, featured by Apple three times. Everything is private by default, backed up nightly to Dropbox if you like, searchable across all your years, and yours to export at any time.
Some people think of each sealed line as a letter to their future self, which is the same idea from the reading end.
If you’re new to keeping a journal this small, the one line a day page covers the habit, and the little tour shows the whole quiet thing. Building one for a child’s first years is its own lovely version of this — there’s a page on keeping it as a new parent.
