Your mood journal, without the mood button
A mood app journal usually starts with a button. Tap a face, pick a tag, done. There is another way: let the mood come from what you actually said and did.
deariary blog
#essay
32 articles tagged "essay".
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The Hawthorne effect in your pocket
The Hawthorne effect explains why being measured changes you. For self-tracking, that is a feature. For a diary trying to record your real days, a problem.
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DARPA built a lifelog in 2003. We ended up with it anyway.
DARPA's LifeLog program tried to capture one person's entire experience. It was killed by privacy outrage in 2004. Twenty years later, we built it ourselves.
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Episodic vs semantic memory: knowing is not remembering
Tulving's 1972 distinction explains why you can list the facts of your past without being able to relive a single ordinary day of it.
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Your Netflix watch history is locked inside Netflix
Netflix knows every episode you finished, the exact minute it ended, and how many nights you chose it over going outside. You cannot get any of that out in any useful form. Here is what to do.
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Stop organizing your life. Start preserving it.
The second-brain promise is retrieval. What most people actually want is continuity. Those are different problems, and the fix is different too.
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Flashbulb memories are lying to you. Your data is not.
The most vivid memories feel like exact recordings. Decades of research show they rewrite themselves every retelling. Your diary does not.
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Proust's madeleine was a calendar event, actually
The madeleine scene describes what psychology took 80 years to confirm: involuntary memory runs on specific external cues. The madeleine is not the point.
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The Five Minute Journal costs five minutes. Here is what it also costs.
The five-minute pitch hides costs beyond time: decision load, curation bias, and the days the journal never captured.
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The automatic journal manifesto
Seven tenets for what an automatic journal is, what it must deliver, and what it must refuse. A declaration, not a definition.
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Automatic memory: the category nobody named yet
Spotify Wrapped, Apple Memories, contribution graphs: these are all automatic memory. The category exists. It just has not been named.
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You watched 100 movies this year. Research says you remember 10.
Memory research explains why most films fade within weeks. The gap between what you watched and what you remember is a measurable feature of human memory.
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The grief journal for what you don't want to forget
Therapists recommend grief journals, but grief takes the energy a person would need to keep one. An automatic diary has already been writing the record.
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Chat diary: when journaling becomes a conversation
Chat diary apps reframe journaling as texting. Here is what the chat format gets right about capture, and what it still cannot do about rereading.
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The Zeigarnik effect: why unfinished days stay in your head
The Zeigarnik effect explains why incomplete tasks nag at you. But the science is stranger than the headline: what persists is tension, not memory.
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A diary without feelings is just a log
Journal, diary, log: most apps collapse all three. The one ingredient that turns a log into a diary is the one software cannot supply on its own.
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Nostalgia is a painkiller. Your diary is the prescription.
Research on nostalgia benefits shows it reduces pain, fights loneliness, and gives life meaning. A diary is the most reliable trigger you can build for it.
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Your Slack conversations are disappearing
Slack's free plan hides messages after 90 days and deletes them after a year. Here is what that means for your memories.
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Your busiest days vanish first
The days you accomplished the most are the ones you remember the least. Cognitive load explains why.
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I stopped journaling. Then my diary started writing itself.
I quit journaling for good. Months later, a diary appeared that covered every day I had given up on. Here is what that felt like.
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I don't do anything interesting enough to keep a diary
The most vivid diary entries come from ordinary days. You do not need an interesting life to have a diary worth reading.
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A diary has no ROI. That is exactly why it matters.
Journaling resists measurement. That resistance is the source of its value, not a flaw to engineer away.
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A coding journal that writes itself from your commits
Brag docs, TILs, and dev journals all die the same way. deariary builds a coding journal from your commits, PRs, and reviews instead.
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Turn your Google Calendar into a journal
Your calendar already tracks your days. Here's how to turn that schedule into a journal worth re-reading.
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Day One made me love journaling. Then life got busy.
A love letter to Day One, the journal app that started it all, and why we needed something that could keep going when we couldn't.
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I can't remember what I did yesterday
Yesterday was a full day. You lived every hour of it. Try describing it now.
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Privacy-first diary generation
An automatic diary needs your data to work. Here is how deariary handles that responsibility.
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A diary is not for today
You will become someone else. A diary is the only way that person can meet who you are right now.
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The case for effortless journaling
Every recording domain eventually automates. Personal diaries are simply the last to catch up.
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Re-reading your diary three months later
A diary is not for the day you write it. It is for the morning you open it again and feel the whole day return.
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The forgetting problem: why most days disappear
Most of your life will be forgotten. Not the big moments, the ordinary ones. Here is why, and what you can do about it.
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The diary I couldn't keep
Why I built deariary, and what LLMs actually do for a diary.