What to Do With Old Journals

keep, read, digitize, or let go

There’s a box. Maybe several. Spiral notebooks from school, a leather one somebody gave you, a half-finished five-year book. You can’t throw them away and you can’t quite live with them either, so they sit in the closet being a small, permanent question.

There isn’t one right answer. There are four reasonable ones, and most people end up doing a bit of each.

Keep them, properly

If they’re staying, give them a box that isn’t the one they came in. Something dry, out of the light, not in the garage. Put the years on the outside so you don’t have to open every notebook to find 2009. That’s the whole job. They don’t need to be on a shelf to be kept.

Read them once

Before deciding anything, read them. Really read them, in order, on an afternoon with nothing after it. People who do this almost always change their mind about what they want to keep, usually in the direction of keeping less and valuing it more. There’s a page on what rereading an old diary is like, if you want to know what you’re in for.

Digitize the part that matters

Scanning every page of every notebook is a project nobody finishes. The version that gets done is smaller:

• Photograph the pages that stopped you. The phone camera is enough. A scanning app straightens them if you want that.
• Type out the lines, not the pages. Twenty sentences from a notebook is usually the whole notebook, for your purposes.
• Give them their dates. A line is worth more when you know which Tuesday it was. If you keep a diary on your phone, you can jump to the old date and put the line where it belongs.

Let some of them go

This is the one people need permission for, so: you’re allowed. Some journals were written to get through something, and they did their job. Shredding or burning them is a real tradition and not a betrayal. Read first, keep the twenty lines, and then the notebook has nothing left in it that you need.

And the next one

Whatever you decide about the box, there’s the question of what comes after it. Most of the notebooks ended because they asked for a page a day and the days didn’t have one.

Little Memory asks for one line. It’s a little diary for your iPhone: a reminder in the evening, a sentence about today, about fifteen seconds. It brings the old lines back to you on its own, a week, a month, and a year later, so there’s no box at the end of it. Just the days, in order, reading themselves back.

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.

1. a week later
2. a month
3. three months
4. six months
5. a year
6. 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.

It’s free to download and private by default. If you’d like to see how it compares to the paper five-year memory books, there’s a page for that, and one on getting back into journaling if the box is the reason you stopped.