There are numerous advantages to daily journaling: those who keep a record of their thoughts, feelings, and actions report that it helps them to reflect on their circumstances and aids in personal growth. Physical benefits abound as well: maintaining a journal aids with stress management, improves your mood, and more.
For many, however, writing in a journal every day is a difficult habit to build, since the empty page can be intimidating. Without a set structure to follow, especially busy or significant days may seem too overwhelming to summarize, while less eventful ones may not feel worth chronicling at all.
By using innovative methods involving your smartphone and the classic notebook (with a twist), you can maintain a record of your daily life in a meaningful way.
One Second Every Day (1SE) App
Thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones, capturing silly, meaningful, and memorable events over the course of a typical day is easier than ever before. Modern phones have both photo and video capabilities, and if a picture is worth 1,000 words, a video is worth many times more. The elements of sound and movement evoke a stronger association with the moment than any still photo.
This idea is what drove Cesar Kuriyama to create One Second Every Day, a smartphone app that allows you to upload a video daily. The app provides tools to crop each video and choose your favorite second. At the end of a week, month, or year, the app mashes the video snippets together, providing an easily digestible account of any span of time.
The videos can be of anyone or anything: an unusual or especially good meal, a book you happen to be reading, a group of friends, or a moment of your commute to work or school. The format is simultaneously constraining and demanding, but it’s quicker and easier than sitting down to a blank journal page at the end of every day.
In addition to bringing life to a seemingly mundane week or month, the challenge of finding moments to record will push you make each day meaningful. As time goes on and your video diary grows longer, you may find yourself calling a friend who you haven’t seen in a while, signing up for a new exercise class, or visiting a new restaurant that you’ve been meaning to try.
One Line A Day: A Five Year Memory Journal
The one line a day journal relies on the traditional method of pen and paper rather than smartphone technology, but it is structured in a unique way.
The pages of the journal are not blank; instead, each section lists a date at the top (beginning with January 1 and continuing all the way to New Year’s Eve, December 31). The pages are divided into five sections, containing a space to write in the current year and a few lines.
The idea behind the journal is to write just one or two sentences to sum up each day. For five years, you’ll move steadily through the pages, only to turn back to the first page at the start of each new year. Once you’ve made it through a full year, you’ll be able to compare past and present entries in real time: the highlights of each given day exactly one, two, three, and four years ago will be readily apparent as you make your entry each day.
This concept has some similarities to the One Second Every Day app: by using an ultra-condensed format, it challenges you to immortalize one or two highlights of your day. While it’s easier to experience a week, month, or year in review by watching a compilation of one second videos, the One Line A Day journal provides the option of describing what’s on your mind along with providing a basic summary. Also, while a missed day of taking video cannot be recovered, it’s easy enough to catch up on your One Line a Day journal if you end up falling a day or two behind.
You can begin a One Line A Day journal using any notebook: just write the date at the top of each page and divide pages into five sections. The journal designed by Yao Cheng, however, is gorgeous and inspiring. There are celestial, floral, canvas, and modern designs available, and the pages have a watercolor background that is striking, yet light enough that it does not compete with your words.
If you’ve tried and failed to maintain a traditional journal and are looking for an innovative way to keep a record of your thoughts, feelings, and experiences, you should consider giving One Second Every Day or One Line A Day a try. You could even do both: the combined effort recording a few seconds of video and writing one or two lines will take up less than ten minutes of your time.
Finally, One Second Every Day and One Line A Day could empower you to scale back or even eliminate your use of social media, if you so choose. Facebook, Instagram, and other websites and apps offer features that display memories from previous years, but these journaling methods do this naturally while also encouraging you to take risks and live your most authentic life.
Julia Anderson 