Small moments

A year ago I started a routine of writing down three positive things that happened every day. It didn’t matter how small they were, as long as I hit a minimum of three. A year and over a 1,000 moments later, I ventured to expanding this habit into a daily journal.

Photos have played a big part in my life. So, the journaling tool needed to allow entries to work seamlessly with images during my trips down memory lane. This is where Day One comes in. The app is dense with features including Markdown support, locations, reminders, tags, and iCloud/Dropbox integration just to name a few.

I also set out with the goal of attaching an image to each day that passed. While this seems hard, I’ve found that screenshots¹ are an easy way accomplish this. Small digital moments make great memories. Examples I’ve found in my journal are random “I love you!” messages from my family, hilarious conversations on my team’s chat room, or even getting a pull request merged on day 1 of work.

Over the course of six months, I’ve managed to save 830 (~250MB) of these electronic moments that I would’ve otherwise forgotten. To make this even easier, I’ve redirected all my screenshots to a Dropbox folder for automatic backup².

Day One photo stream

I now spend the last 10 minutes of each night writing my heart out and picking an image for the day. Imagine creating a slideshow with these images. You could summarize a year’s worth of memories in under 20 minutes³!

Come to think of it, I’ll make sure to write that down in today’s entry :)

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