The secret is to get one where you only have to write a tiny bit each day.
This is One Thing, a column with tips on how to live.
I’ve made the promise to myself so many times: I will keep a diary. I like the idea that one day, decades into the future, I can turn over the story of my life in wrinkled hands and remember what might otherwise get forgotten. So periodically, I go and buy yet another notebook and start afresh on writing a diary with all the best intentions. Like most people, I drop the habit after a few weeks or months.
Finally, I figured out how to make it stick. The answer is a five-year diary, also sometimes called a “one-line-a-day memory book.” I got mine from a company called Letts, but get it from wherever you like, as long as it has these quite specific features: It should have 365 pages, one for every day of the year. Each of those pages should be divided into five sections horizontally. So, you will write a little bit for July 3, 2024, and then a year later you will write a little bit right below for July 3, 2025. (Mine is A5 size, 5.83 inches by 8.27 inches, which allows for five lines each day, versus the smaller, but also popular, true “line-a-day” journals, which I don’t think offer quite enough room.)
I have been doing it without fail for almost two years now. I originally started because I was taking medication that made my memory fuzzy, which freaked me out. But I’ve come to love it for a bunch of other reasons, too. Before, I had diaries with great yawning pages of space to fill each day, and the prospect of laboring over an exhaustive account of everything I had thought, felt, or seen in the previous 24 hours. But with a five-year diary, you don’t need to do very much. I always have time to record a tiny bit about my day. And there is no pressure to make the prose beautiful, or tell a crafted story, because there simply isn’t the space.
That small amount of space has also forced me to start asking myself what is important for my future self to know, which is itself an interesting exercise. What did I actually want to record? For me, it turned out I wanted to keep it relatively light on the emotion and focus mainly on recording the mundane events that add up to a life, and funny things people said or did which might otherwise be forgotten.
As a full year came around of diary-writing, I also started to be able to read the last year’s entry above the new one I’m writing. Every day, I get to read and remember a random day from last year. And I started to notice patterns. Things I was doing that reliably made me feel good, bad, anxious: It was all there, clear to see from a year’s distance. And, crucially, the funny things people said still make me smile.
But the greatest thing about the five-year diary is that it feels like diary-writing without too much navel-gazing. How much attention is a good amount of attention to pay to yourself every day? The answer is five lines.
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