What Did I Do on This Day?
how to piece a day back together
It starts with a date. Someone asks what you were doing this time last year, or you find a receipt, or a song comes on and you know you heard it on a particular afternoon and can’t place the afternoon. The day is in there somewhere. It just didn’t leave a note.
Your phone kept more of it than you’d think. Here’s where to look, in the order that usually works.
1. Photos, by date
Open the Photos app and search the date, or scroll the library back to that month. Even a photo of a parking sign tells you where you were. The pictures around it fill in the rest of the day, and the ones from the day before and after usually explain why you were there.
2. Where you were
If Location History or Timeline is on in Google Maps, it will show you the places you stopped that day, in order. Apple Maps keeps a shorter list under Significant Locations. Either one turns “I think I was out” into “the hardware store, then that taco place.”
3. Check-ins and the calendar
If you check in anywhere, Swarm or Foursquare has the day laid out like a diary you didn’t know you were keeping. The calendar does the same for anything you planned: the dentist, the dinner, the flight.
4. Messages, email, and the bank
Scroll your messages back to that week. Half of what you did that day, you told someone about. Email has the orders and confirmations, and a card statement has everything you paid for, which is a strangely honest account of an afternoon.
5. Steps, songs, and the rest
The Health app knows whether you walked a lot or not at all. Your music app knows what you played. Even the weather on that date is a search away, and “it poured” is sometimes the thing that brings the whole day back.
What’s still missing
Put all of that together and you get a decent sketch: where you went, who you talked to, what you bought. What none of it holds is what the day was like. Whether you were happy, what you were worried about, the joke someone made at dinner. That part only exists if somebody wrote it down at the time.
It takes about fifteen seconds to write down. Little Memory is a little diary for your iPhone: one line about today, most nights, and on this date next year, and every year after, it shows you what you wrote. Hardware store, then tacos with Sam. Rained. Felt better than I have in weeks. No detective work.
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.
I love the clean, simple design. No pushy ads, no up-sells… I love when I see what old memories come up, where I was on the same date years ago.
craisin-chan, App Store Review
Nothing here reaches back and recovers last year, so the day you’re trying to find now still needs the steps above. The next one won’t. If what brought you here is that the weeks keep running together, there’s a page on remembering every day, and if you’d like to see what any date looked like for everyone else, there’s this day, year by year.
