When Twitter rolled into Austin for South by Southwest in 2007, it was an infant with tempered hopes of one day becoming a toddler. After winning “best startup” of the show, the company used the momentum to officially launch, and the rest is history. Twitter introduced the world to a relatively new idea of “statuses.” Limited to 140 characters, these status updates, called tweets, became a behavior the world would categorize as “microblogging.” Thirteen years later the term isn’t commonly used, but the concept remains—the activity or practice of making short, frequent posts to a microblog. While some may think Twitter is the best place for short, frequent posts about one’s life, we politely disagree. We believe it’s Day One, and instead of “microblogging,” it’s the perfect place for something we call “microjournaling.”
Microjournaling has much the same definition as microblogging, except with one key difference: rather than being public, it’s private. With microjournaling, there’s no retweet hunting or like seeking. Rather, this is something done by you, for you. We’ve loaded Day One up with a wide arsenal of features that allow you to microjournal in a variety of ways, finding those that work best for you. Here are a just a few examples:
- Using the Apple Watch’s audio recorder to capture a few quick thoughts as you wait for a bus or train.
- Snapping a photo and saving it straight to Day One with a brief caption: “Best peaches of the summer.”; “First flat tire!”; “Maddy’s soccer team.”
- A brief text-only journal entry that captures your mood, the day’s goals, a recap of a business meeting, thoughts on a news article, or one of thousands of other snippets you can easily jot down from your day.
- An automated journal entry using IFTTT to automatically log a jog or bike ride, the Day One Instagram Importer that automatically pulls in posts, or a Siri shortcut you run to pull in the front page of the day’s newspaper.
- Responding to the Day One Daily Prompt. It refreshes daily and your response can be as simple as a single sentence.
Rather than only waiting to record all your thoughts at the end of the day (which we also think is a great behavior), microjournaling is something you can easily do quickly on the go. Our brains experience so much stimuli over the course of a day, that if we don’t jot something down in the moment, we risk losing it or having it diluted by the time we revisit it again hours or days later. Ellis Hamburger, writing for the Verge eight years ago, said, “What matters most is the act of saving and not letting the tiny private things in life evaporate.” He continues, “The app rewards brevity, and after using it for a couple months, it became obvious that Day One is a journal for the Twitter age. I find myself frequently bringing up Day One’s menu bar app to throw random obscenities, thoughts, jokes, and ideas into.”
Within the walls of your Day One journal, there are no trending topics, no trolls to fend off, and no ads to distract you. It’s just you and whatever you want to capture. If you haven’t started using Day One as a personal microjournaling platform, what do you say about starting today?
