How to start a diary, and keep going

Most diaries don’t stop because their owners run out of things to say. They stop because writing one starts to feel like homework. Here are a few ways to keep it from turning into that.

Make it smaller than you think

The first week is not the time for long pages. Decide on the smallest thing that still counts as an entry, such as a title for the day and one sentence, and let anything more be a bonus. A short entry you actually write is worth more than a long one you keep putting off.

Write after the day, not during it

A diary is easier to keep when it has a fixed moment: in bed, on the way home, with the last cup of tea. Writing at the end of the day also gives you some distance. Things that felt huge at noon often look different by the evening, and that difference is worth writing down.

Give the day a name

Instead of starting with “Today I…”, try giving the day a title, the way a TV episode has one: “The one with the flat tyre”, “Mum’s birthday”, “Rain, and nothing else”. A title makes you decide what the day was really about, and months later the titles alone are enough to bring whole days back.

Measure, don’t only describe

A quick score out of ten, for how the day went, how much energy you had and how happy you were, takes seconds. Over weeks it adds up to something words can’t show on their own: the shape of your life. You start to notice which kinds of days lift you and which wear you down.

Skipping is allowed

You will miss days. That is normal, and it is the moment most diaries end, because a gap feels like failure. It isn’t. Fill in yesterday in two lines if you remember it, or simply start again today. A diary with gaps is still a record of your life; an abandoned one isn’t.

Ordinary days count

Not every day is a story, and a diary that only holds the big moments gives a strange picture of a life. Write down the quiet days too, even if all you write is that nothing happened. Later, those are often the days you miss most.

How Episome helps

Episome was built around these ideas. Every day is an episode with a title, a genre and three scores, which can take less than a minute. Questions such as “What will you remember?” are there when you want something to write about, and you can answer one or skip them all. A day when nothing happened is saved too, as a quiet grey square in your archive. Every ninety days a season ends and Episome plays it back to you, so the habit pays you back.