Why you should journal your ordinary days

In September 1982, a 22-year-old named Gert Storms started a diary. Decades later, by then a psychologist, he tested his memory against 2,691 of his notes spanning 24 years. He remembered fewer than 2 in 3 of the events he had written down.

Dates fared worse. He put the right date on only about 2 in 100 events, and the events he remembered best were the ones he had thought or talked about again over the years.

Storms wrote those notes the way anyone keeps a diary, so his losses are a fair guess at yours. More than a third of the events he wrote down now exist only on paper.

Your memory is doing the same to you right now, and it is hardest on the ordinary days and on how the hard days felt. Writing them down while they happen is how you keep them.

The boring entries turn into the best ones

At about three in the morning on 2 September 1666, a maid woke Samuel Pepys to say London was on fire. He looked out of the window, decided the fire was far enough off and went back to bed. Two days later, with the fire still spreading, he and a colleague dug a pit in the garden for their wine, and Pepys put his parmesan cheese in with it. That night he ate a shoulder of mutton from the cook’s, without a napkin.

His diary for that week is the only reason anyone knows this, and readers still smile at it 360 years later. They don’t need Pepys to tell them London burned, but a man who goes back to sleep and then rescues his cheese is someone they recognise.

Your own ordinary days will land the same way with future you. Ting Zhang went looking for the reason after noticing that her family photos showed birthdays, holidays and trips, and almost never an ordinary day. Her team had 135 college students fill time capsules in 2014 with a recent conversation, three songs on repeat and an inside joke. 3 months later, the students were far more curious and absorbed than they had predicted.

Later experiments found the ordinary moments gained the most with time. People underestimated how much they would enjoy them partly because they trusted they would remember those moments, and they didn’t.

Your memory rewrites the hard days

Picture the night before a job interview. You iron the shirt twice, rehearse one answer until it sounds fake and leave half your dinner on the plate. Ten years later, you’ll sum up the whole week as “It went fine.”

That edit has a name, the fading affect bias, meaning bad feelings fade first. The sting of an unpleasant event wears off faster than the glow of a pleasant one, even in people who had rated each event on the day it happened. You’ll still know the interview took place, but you’ll lose how scared you were, and no amount of thinking back will return it. The only accurate copy is the one you write that night.

The tiny facts you skip become history

Between 1852 and 1858, Henry David Thoreau walked the fields around Concord, Massachusetts, and wrote down the day each wildflower first bloomed. He tracked more than 500 kinds of plants in handwriting.

A century and a half later, two biologists spent about six months searching for old plant records before they learned Thoreau’s notes existed. Their 2008 comparison of 43 common species found those plants now flowered about a week earlier than in his day, as the town warmed. Notes he made for himself turned into climate data.

Your journal does the same job for a single life. Dates are the weakest part of your memory, and a date at the top of a page tells future you when something happened. A bus fare, a headline everyone argued about or the week of the first frost tells future you what that season was like, and how far the world has moved since.

Your journal plan

The following are 5 steps in the order you’ll do them.

1. Open every entry with the day, the time, where you’re sitting and one price
   Do it every time you write, and it takes under a minute. “Tuesday 6 October, 21:40, kitchen table” covers the first part. Then add one figure that will look strange in ten years, like the price of a coffee, a bus ticket or a litre of milk. Memory drops dates long before it drops events.
2. Write 3 to 5 lines about one ordinary scene you’d never bother telling anyone
   Give it 3 to 5 minutes on most evenings. Pick one moment and write who was there, where they sat or stood, and one sentence someone said, word for word. Add a sound or a smell only if you noticed one. People undervalue ordinary moments more than special ones, and the ordinary ones gain the most with time.
3. When a day goes badly, write the worry down before you know how it ends
   Give it 5 minutes whenever something keeps you awake. Write what you’re afraid will happen, what your body is doing and the last words someone said to you about it. Skip the lesson, because the reread will supply it. Memory softens bad days first. Interview tomorrow at 10. Ironed the blue shirt twice. Ate half my dinner. Dad texted “you’ve got this” and I nearly cried.
4. On Sunday evening, write a longer entry about the world outside your door
   Once a week, 10 to 15 minutes. Note the first frost, the week the birch leaves turned, the song everyone at work keeps playing, what’s in the fridge and the local argument on the news. Thoreau’s flower dates turned into data a century and a half after he wrote them.
5. Reread on the same date every year, and keep the pages safe
   Once a year, about an hour. Pick your birthday or New Year’s Eve and read the same week from one year and five years back. Paper and apps both work, but if you type, export everything to plain text once a year so a closed app can’t take your decade with it.

Run the 10-year test on tonight’s entry

Read tonight’s entry as if a stranger found it in 2036. Check that they could tell the season, roughly the year and who was in the room, and that they could hear one person’s voice in a sentence quoted word for word. If any of those is missing, add one line with a price, a name or a quote.

The bottom line

Picture yourself ten years from now, opening a notebook from tonight. The bus fare makes you laugh. The worry you were sure would wreck the week is one you can no longer remember, and seeing it in your own handwriting shows you how much you have handled since. There is a sentence your child said, word for word, in a voice that has since dropped an octave. There is a text from someone who may not be around to send another one.

A decade-old entry hands you back days your memory had already deleted. It shows you the true size of the problems you got through, which makes the next one look smaller. It gives you advice specific enough to help the people coming up behind you, and it records a version of the world, its prices and songs and arguments, that nobody else will write down for you.

The first entry takes 5 minutes and 4 lines: the date and a price, one ordinary scene, one sentence someone said word for word, and whatever is keeping you awake. Write them before bed, and give the person you’ll be in 10 years something to open.

Frequently asked questions

What should I write in a journal so I’ll want to read it in 10 years?

Write the date, time and place, one ordinary scene with someone’s exact words, and one fact from the outside world such as a price or the weather. A 2014 time-capsule study of 135 college students found that people most underestimate how much they’ll enjoy rereading ordinary moments, compared with special ones. Big events tend to stay in memory in outline, while everyday detail disappears first.

How often should I write in a journal?

A few lines on most evenings plus one longer weekly entry suits most people, and missing days does little harm. A psychologist who tested himself on 2,691 diary notes from 24 years averaged about two notes a week, and those notes preserved more than a third of events his memory had lost. In a 6-week gratitude experiment, students who counted their blessings once a week gained in well-being while those who did it three times a week did not, which suggests a writing habit stays fresher when it isn’t a daily chore.

Is journaling by hand better than typing?

Either works for a 10-year journal, so pick the one you’ll keep up and store it in a format that will last.

Should I reread my old journal entries?

Yes, ideally on a fixed date each year. A 2024 self-experiment on 24 years of diary notes found that the events the writer had gone back over in his mind were the best remembered and the most accurately dated. A diary study of 169 summer interns found that those who reread their entries two months later gave newcomers more specific advice, rated higher by 93 future interns, than those who relied on memory.

What is the fading affect bias?

The fading affect bias is the tendency for the bad feeling attached to a memory to fade faster than the good feeling attached to a happy one. A 2003 review of diary and recall studies found the pattern across many groups of people, though it was weaker in people with mild depression. It explains why hard times often look easier in hindsight than they felt, and why entries written in the moment keep the true version.

Resources

1. Storms, G., “If My Memory Serves Me Well: Investigating My Memory for the Past 24 Years,” Journal of Cognition, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5334/joc.334
2. Zhang, T., Kim, T., Brooks, A. W., Gino, F. & Norton, M. I., “A ‘Present’ for the Future: The Unexpected Value of Rediscovery,” Psychological Science, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614542274
3. Association for Psychological Science, “Rediscovering Our Mundane Moments Brings Us Unexpected Pleasure,” press release, 2014. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/rediscovering-our-mundane-moments-brings-us-unexpected-pleasure.html
4. Walker, W. R., Skowronski, J. J. & Thompson, C. P., “Life Is Pleasant—and Memory Helps to Keep It That Way!,” Review of General Psychology, 2003. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.7.2.203
5. Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K. M. & Schkade, D., “Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change,” Review of General Psychology, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.111