The Drawer of Unfinished Journals
eleven pages in, every time
There’s a drawer, or a shelf, or a box at the back of a closet. In it are four or five lovely notebooks, and every one of them has between six and twenty pages filled. The handwriting is careful at the start and gets looser, and then it stops, usually somewhere in February.
You didn’t lose interest — you can tell, because you bought the next one. Something else was going on, and it’s worth naming, because it isn’t a character flaw and it has a straightforward way around it.
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.
A nice notebook quietly raises the price
A beautiful blank book asks to be filled with something worthy of it. So the entry has to be legible, and reasonably interesting, and not end mid-thought. Cross something out and the page is spoiled. Skip a week and the gap is right there in the paper — in order, permanent, to be flipped past every time you open it.
None of that is the notebook’s fault. It’s just what a lovely object does to the standard. And a standard that high is very expensive to meet on a Tuesday night when you’re tired — which is most nights, which is why it stops in February.
Nothing here to keep nice
Little Memory, an iPhone app, has no pages to fill and no object to spoil. There’s no handwriting to be ashamed of, no cross-outs, no leftover blank space at the bottom of an entry. Days you didn’t write don’t sit in a stack where you can see them. There’s simply nothing to ruin, which takes the whole question off the table.
One sentence can’t be done badly
An entry is one line about something that happened, about fifteen seconds. Fixed the gate. Ate lunch outside for the first time this year. Long call with Mom, good one. Fragments count. Lowercase counts. There’s no length to fall short of, and no audience, so there is nothing for perfectionism to get hold of.
The reminder arrives in the evening and replying to it saves the day, which also means there’s no clean new notebook waiting to be started properly. You just answer an email, badly, for fifteen seconds.
I’ve tried for years and years to keep a journal. I tried various apps and tried using txt files. This app is so simple I don’t “feel bad” writing a sentence or two and being done.
Dropkick, App Store Review
The reason this one gets past February
Paper journals ask you to keep writing on faith, and the good part is somewhere years off. Little Memory brings it much closer. Your lines come back to you a week later, a month later, and then on this day every year, so within a week you’re already getting something back for the fifteen seconds. That turns out to matter more than discipline does.
Keep the nice notebooks. They’re nice. This is for the days in between, when nothing about you is up to a nice notebook.
If it’s the empty screen that stops you rather than the standard, there’s a page on blank page anxiety. If it’s the writing itself, try journaling when you hate writing. And if the notebooks were only ever part of a much longer list of things that stopped in February, there’s a page on journaling with ADHD. Or take the little tour.
