Interstitial journaling vs deariary: logging between tasks vs logging from your tasks
You finish a Zoom call. Before opening your next task, you glance at the clock: 10:47. You type a line into your note-taking app.
“10:47 - Done with the product sync. Need to update the spec before the 1pm review. Feeling scattered after that conversation about the timeline change.”
Three minutes later, you start the spec update. When you pause for coffee at 11:30, another line:
“11:30 - Spec is half-done. Going to grab coffee and clear my head. The timeline conversation is still bugging me.”
This is interstitial journaling, a method coined by Tony Stubblebine (CEO of Medium). The idea: every time you switch between tasks, write a timestamp and a few lines about what just happened, how you feel, and what comes next. The gaps between tasks, those two or three minutes where you are not yet doing the next thing, become tiny journaling windows.
The method has real elegance. It does not ask for a dedicated journaling session. It does not require a morning ritual or an evening review. It lives in the transitions, borrowing time you were already spending on context switches.
deariary operates in the same territory: capturing the texture of a day without a dedicated writing session. But it captures the tasks themselves, not the transitions. Your calendar, your task manager, your messaging apps, your code host already record what you did. deariary connects to those services and assembles a diary entry overnight. No timestamps to type. No transition notes to write. No gaps to catch.
Both methods share the same premise: a diary should not require a separate appointment with yourself. They disagree about who does the work.
What interstitial journaling does well
Interstitial journaling stands out from other journaling methods because it does not compete for time. It reuses time that is already unproductive.
Transitions are otherwise wasted. Research on task switching shows that shifting between cognitively demanding tasks involves an “attention residue” period: your mind is still processing the previous task while nominally starting the next one (Leroy, 2009). Interstitial journaling makes this residue intentional. Instead of half-scrolling Twitter while your brain catches up, you write a line about what just happened. The residue becomes data.
It creates a real-time timeline. Because each entry is timestamped at the moment of writing, the resulting journal is a chronological log of your day as it happened. Not a reconstruction at 9pm trying to remember what you did at 10am. Not a morning plan that may not survive first contact with reality. A live record, captured in the moment, with emotional context intact. The 10:47 entry knows you felt scattered. The 9pm reconstruction would not.
It doubles as a task manager and time tracker. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who popularized the practice through Ness Labs, points out that interstitial journaling naturally combines three functions: journaling (what happened and how you feel), task management (what you plan to do next), and time tracking (timestamps reveal how long each block actually took). You do not need three separate tools. The journal is the planner is the timesheet.
The barrier to each entry is low. A single interstitial entry is two or three sentences. You are not filling a page or answering prompts. You are noting a transition: what ended, what begins, and anything that crossed your mind in between. The micro-commitment makes it easier to sustain than methods that require longer writing sessions.
It captures emotional context alongside logistics. “Feeling scattered after that conversation about the timeline change” is the kind of detail that vanishes from every other record of your day. Your calendar says “Product Sync, 10:00-10:45.” Your task manager says nothing. Only the interstitial entry catches the emotional undertone that colored the next two hours.
Where the gaps stop appearing
Interstitial journaling works best in a specific kind of day: one where tasks have clear boundaries and transitions are distinct. A knowledge worker at a desk, moving between focused blocks with recognizable breaks, is the ideal practitioner.
But many days are not like that.
Back-to-back meetings erase the gaps. When your calendar stacks three calls from 1pm to 3:30pm with no breaks between them, there are no transitions to journal in. The method depends on interstitial space existing. On the busiest days (the days where a record matters most), the gaps shrink to zero.
Some tasks bleed into each other. You start debugging a test failure, realize it is a data issue, switch to the database console, Slack a colleague for context, get pulled into a thread about a related deployment, and thirty minutes later the original test passes. Where was the transition? There were five micro-switches inside what felt like one continuous task. Interstitial journaling is designed for discrete boundaries. Fluid, interrupt-driven work does not always provide them.
The method is location-dependent. Interstitial journaling requires your note-taking app to be open and accessible at every transition. At a desk, this works. During a commute, a gym session, a grocery run, a conversation with a friend, or a walk with no phone in hand, the journal stops. The day continues, but the entries do not.
Each entry is voluntary. If you skip a transition (you jump straight into the next task because you are in flow, or because the urgency does not leave room for a two-sentence pause), that transition is gone. There is no retroactive way to fill it in. The entry that would have said “2:15 - That meeting was rough, but the decision is made” simply does not exist unless you stopped to write it.
The emotional layer is selective. Interstitial journaling excels at capturing how you felt at 10:47 between specific tasks. It does not capture the general texture of the day: the background hum of a busy Thursday, the quiet rhythm of a slow Saturday, the contrast between a packed morning and an empty afternoon. These patterns emerge from the full shape of a day, not from individual transitions.
What deariary does differently
deariary does not wait for gaps. It reads the tools that are already running.
Your calendar recorded the product sync from 10:00 to 10:45, the spec review at 1pm, and the 1:1 with your manager at 3:30. Your task manager recorded the three tasks you completed between meetings. GitHub recorded the PR you merged at 4:15. Slack recorded the conversations in #engineering and #product. Bluesky recorded the post you wrote during lunch about the new API design.
None of this data required a transition pause. It accumulated as a side effect of working. deariary connects to these services and generates a prose diary entry overnight: “Product sync at 10am. Three Todoist tasks closed, including ‘update onboarding spec.’ Spec review at 1pm. Merged PR #247: fix rate-limit headers. 1:1 with Sam at 3:30. 18 Slack messages across three channels. Bluesky post about API design patterns.”
The entry is factual. It contains no emotional context, no “feeling scattered,” no reflections on what comes next. It captures what happened, not what the transitions between events felt like.
This means deariary and interstitial journaling are capturing different layers of the same day. One captures the transitions. The other captures the events. One depends on your presence at every gap. The other depends on your tools being connected.
Side by side
| Interstitial journaling | deariary | |
|---|---|---|
| When you write | At every task transition | Never (automatic) |
| What it captures | Timestamps, reflections, plans, emotions | Calendar events, tasks, commits, messages, posts |
| What it misses | Gaps you skipped, non-desk hours | Emotions, reflections, transition thoughts |
| Time per day | 10-20 minutes total (2-3 min per transition) | None |
| Requires | A note-taking app open at every break | Connected services |
| Best at | Emotional context, real-time awareness | Complete event coverage, including days you are too busy to pause |
| Worst at | Back-to-back days with no breaks | Inner experience |
| Missed day | No entries | Entry still appears |
| Tools needed | Any text editor (Roam, Notion, plain text) | deariary |
| Cost | Free (any note app) | Free (one integration), paid plans for more |
The same Thursday, two records
It is a dense Thursday. Four meetings, a PR review, a production incident, a lunch you barely tasted.
Your interstitial journal has seven entries:
“9:02 - Starting the day anxious about the incident response plan. Need to check Grafana first.” “9:48 - Grafana looks stable. Standup in 10 min. Going to raise the monitoring gap.” “10:35 - Standup ran long. Everyone worried about Friday’s release. Need to write the rollback plan before 1pm.” “12:50 - Rollback plan sent. Exhausted. Going to eat something and not think about it.” “2:05 - Back from lunch. 1:1 with Alex cancelled, so I have an unexpected free block.” “3:30 - Used the free block to review Mika’s PR. Found a subtle race condition. Good catch.” “5:15 - Wrapping up. Better day than it felt at 9am. The monitoring gap conversation went well.”
deariary’s entry for the same Thursday: “Standup at 10am. Incident review at 11. Design sync at 2pm, moved from 1pm. 1:1 with Alex cancelled. Reviewed PR #312: fix webhook retry logic (comment: race condition in batch processor). Five Todoist tasks closed, including ‘write rollback plan’ and ‘update monitoring runbook.’ 31 Slack messages in #engineering, 8 in #incidents. Bluesky post: ‘Found a race condition hiding in plain sight. Code review saves lives.’”
The interstitial journal captured a story: the arc from 9am anxiety to 5pm relief. It captured the emotional weight of the incident, the exhaustion at lunch, the satisfaction of the PR catch. Reading it three months later, you would remember how that Thursday felt.
deariary captured the facts: the meetings, the code, the conversations, the completed tasks. Reading it three months later, you would remember what that Thursday contained. The five closed tasks. The cancelled 1:1 that freed up time. The 31 messages in #engineering that explain why the week felt intense.
Neither record is complete. But together they are.
Who should use which
Use interstitial journaling if you want awareness of your inner state throughout the day. If you find that transitions are where your most honest thoughts surface (between the meeting face and the focused-work face), and you have enough gaps in your schedule to capture them, interstitial journaling turns dead time into self-knowledge. It works best for people whose days have clear task boundaries and who keep a note-taking app within reach.
Use deariary if you want a complete record without pausing your day. If your schedule is too packed for transition notes, or your work is too fluid to have clean breaks, deariary captures the day from your tools instead of from your attention. The diary appears overnight. No gaps needed, no timestamps to type, no app to keep open between tasks.
Use both if you want what deariary captures (the complete event log) and what interstitial journaling captures (the emotional connective tissue). Write your transition notes when you can. Let deariary fill in everything else: the meetings, the tasks, the messages, the commits. Some days you will have seven interstitial entries. Some days you will have zero. The deariary entry will be there either way.
The gap and the event
Interstitial journaling found something genuine: the transitions between tasks are where awareness lives. The pause before the next thing is where you notice how you feel, what you are carrying, what you need. That is a real insight, and no automation can replicate it.
But the transitions are not the whole day. They are the connective tissue between events, and the events themselves are what fill the hours. An interstitial journal with seven entries and a full deariary entry together reconstruct a Thursday more completely than either one alone.
Interstitial journaling asks you to be present at every gap. deariary asks nothing. One captures how the day felt between the tasks. The other captures what the tasks were. The gap and the event, together, are the whole day.
Start free (one integration) at deariary.com.
