What Is a Memory Journal?
A memory journal is a journal you keep in order to read it later. That’s the whole difference. A diary is written for today, to get the day out of your head. A memory journal is written for the person who’ll open it in a year, and everything about it bends toward that: shorter entries, ordinary details, and some way of bringing the old pages back to you.
Little Memory has been the app version of this since 2011 — over 1,000,000 memories saved by over 30,000 journalers, featured by Apple three times.
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.
What actually goes in one
The instinct is to save the big days, and the big days do belong there. But a memory journal that only holds birthdays and holidays turns out to be a thin record of a life. The entries people treasure years later are almost always the small ones: what you ate, who called, the thing your kid said in the car, how the light was.
Rained all afternoon. Tried the new place on Kentucky St. Couldn’t sleep, read until two. Those are three days of a memory journal. Ordinary while you’re writing them, and strangely moving a few years on, because they’re the days you’d never have remembered otherwise.
Which is why short entries work better here than long ones. A sentence takes about fifteen seconds, and fifteen seconds is a thing you can do on a Tuesday when you’re tired. A page is not. There’s more on the short version on the micro-journaling page.
The half most people skip
Writing a memory journal is the easy half. The hard half is reading it, and that’s where most of them quietly end. Notebooks go in a drawer. Notes-app entries sit in a list nobody scrolls. The memories are all there, perfectly preserved, and nothing ever brings them up.
So the useful question about any memory journal isn’t how you write in it. It’s what makes you look back.
Little Memory does the looking back on its own. Each time you open it, it brings back what you wrote a week ago, a month ago, and a year ago. The first happy coincidences show up while the habit is still young, and the journal reaches further back every year you add to it. That’s the part that turns a pile of entries into a time capsule you actually visit.
The app prompts you to “tell your future self” about a little joke or time spent with friends in less than 300 characters… What was mundane at the time is now a milestone, a special glimpse into the past. I always feel a little thrill to see what I wrote in the past contained in a mini, daily time capsule.
Angelica, Uncommon in Common
Memory journal vs. diary vs. gratitude journal
They overlap, and none of this is a rule, but roughly:
- A diary is for processing today. Length varies, and it’s written for you-right-now.
- A gratitude journal narrows the prompt to good things, which is lovely and also means the record skips the rest of your life.
- A memory journal takes the day as it came, briefly, on the understanding that you’ll read it later.
A memory journal is the most forgiving of the three, because nothing in it has to be good writing or a good day.
About the days you’ll miss
You will miss days. Everyone does, and a memory journal survives it fine — a year with gaps in it is still a year you kept. There’s nothing to rebuild and no streak to be ashamed of. If you’ve started and stopped before, that page is for you.
Keeping one on your phone
Little Memory is a memory journal for iPhone. Write a line about today, and it brings your old lines back to you as the years stack up.
- The reminder comes to you. A nightly email, and replying to it saves the day’s line.
- A photo counts as an entry. Some days the memory is a picture.
- Everything is findable. Search all your years in seconds.
- Private by default. No social login, and support comes straight from the developer.
- Nothing gets lost. Automated nightly backups, and you can export everything at any time.
Have a look at the little tour, or see how it compares to the bigger journaling apps on the comparisons page.
