As we scan back through our own journals, we realize that while there’s an ever-present awareness of things happening on the global scale, most of what we wrote about, photographed, and otherwise recorded was on a much more personal level. The “pages” are filled with tales of mind-blowing banana cream pies, failed Halloween costumes, and embarrassing virtual meeting blunders. It’s the small moments that tend to become the sweetest memories.

As we enter the final hours of the year, we hope you will take a moment to reflect upon the things you’ve decided to jot down. What events, feelings, or experiences are you relieved you recorded? What do you wish you had written more about? Did you maintain your journaling streak or were there a few too many blank days in your calendar this year? Did you add any videos to your journal, record any audio, or answer the daily prompts? As we’ve always said, there’s no right way to journal and the only wrong way is to not journal at all. So if you haven’t started, join us. And if you have, stay with us. We don’t know what 2022 has in store, but we imagine it’ll once again be full of surprises—surprises worth preserving in Day One.

Happy New Year! –The Day One Team

The post So Long 2021 appeared first on Day One | Your Journal for Life.

Developing the below five habits and skills will help you become a more proficient and effective writer:

Jot Down Ideas

Thoughts can be fleeting, and it’s frustrating for writers to think of a great idea only to forget it. By making it a habit to jot down any ideas you have the second they come to mind, you will not only keep track of them but also free your mind of room to focus without distractions. After jotting down the initial idea, it’s important to go back and flesh it out.

This will help you relate it to other ideas you may have taken note of to create a more cohesive whole in your writing. You can further refine concepts and theories that will result in a more effective piece once you’re finished writing. Ultimately, you should be able to produce more detailed and thoughtful writing.

Practice Authenticity

Authenticity is of paramount importance today for writers and should shape every aspect of how they communicate, especially if they are writing commercially. According to research, 44% of consumers polled preferred brands with values aligned to theirs, and the relationship between writers and their audiences is no different. As Dustin York points out in his Entrepreneur column, authenticity is key to establishing a connection with readers.

As the active director of Maryville University’s communications program, York has a lot of experience in teaching authenticity when it comes to communication. The lessons he teaches will help writers to create more effective connections with their audiences. It entails establishing a relationship with the audience using various writing techniques to express a clear and genuine message. Authenticity will ultimately allow you to establish your voice as a writer, making your work more impactful and recognizable.

Document Events

Given the benefits that journaling can contribute to one’s writing skills, doing it often is one habit that will make you better at your craft. It’s essential to understand that journaling is not limited to its most traditional form of a notebook and pen — or in this case, with a blank page and a keyboard. Journaling is about documenting events, so you can capture snapshots and videos of daily life. Our #PhotoADay challenge encourages writers to journal this way to enhance their meaning-making and cognitive awareness.

This then translates into writing that has more effective imagery, which in turn will create a stronger connection with the reader. Documenting events this way also develops a writer’s ability to recall, which is crucial to the writing process.

Read Daily

Reading is one of the most effective ways to become a better writer simply because it exposes you to the techniques and styles of various writers and their works. This provides writers with a better understanding of the different literary elements.

Reading daily will give you a better idea of what constitutes great writing, allowing you to practice the different styles you encounter to improve your own writing. It is recommended that you read outside of your comfort zone in order to improve. You never know which style or technique will click for you unless you explore different texts.

Becoming a better writer is a continuous process. Developing these particular skills will not only improve your writing in a technical sense but will also help shape your identity as a writer.

Exclusively contributed to dayoneapp.com by: JBunn

The post Developing Habits and Skills to Become a Better Writer appeared first on Day One | Your Journal for Life.

We’ve said it before and we’re going to keep saying it: when it comes to journaling, privacy is paramount. In order to ensure that what you put in Day One stays private, we’ve included end-to-end encryption and biometric security. End-to-end encryption means when your content is synced with a server, it’s unreadable by anyone on the backend. As for biometric security, we use Apple’s Touch and FaceID (or a numeric passcode) to make sure that if someone gets their hands on your physical device, they still won’t have access to your journal. But we realized there was still one step further we could go, which is why we’re excited to announce the new Concealed Journals feature. If you’ve ever wanted to journal on public transportation, an airplane, or in a coffee shop, you know that wandering eyes can catch a glimpse of what’s on your device. To prevent this, we added the ability, on a journal by journal basis, to conceal content. It’s easy to conceal and unconceal content by simply tapping the eye icon. The feature is available in version 6.6 on the Mac and iOS and can be downloaded from the App Store. If you’re looking for more detailed instructions on how to set up Concealed Journals, take a look at our help guide.

The post Concealed Journals appeared first on Day One | Your Journal for Life.

With the launch of Day One 6.0, you can now text your journal. The feature is currently limited to the United States, but we hope to expand to more countries in the future. Adding text functionality is part of our mission of making journaling simpler and more readily accessible from wherever you are.

For most people, the Messages app is the most used app on their Apple devices. It’s opened and closed dozens, if not hundreds of times a day. Now when you open it up to text someone, you’re already in the right place to create a quick journal entry. Quick, bite-sized messages can make for great journal entries:

“The person in front of me at the coffee shop paid for my drink, so I paid for the person behind me.”

“I got a workout in before work.”

“I’ve decided I really don’t like pickles on burgers.”

“Got a surprise text from Corey today, so fun to hear from her.”

“11th straight day of rain here in Seattle.”

“I feel peaceful today.”

The other key feature we built into Text Messaging are daily journaling reminders. Simply choose the time of day you want to receive a reminder text, and you’ll receive a text that you can quickly respond to. If you have a hard time remembering to journal or have a journaling streak going, you’ll love the Daily Text Reminder.

Text Messaging is part of the Day One Premium membership, with subscribers receiving an SMS balance of 500 messages per year upon their renewal. Additional messages can be purchased at any time from within the app. Text Messaging supports both text and photos. The team has worked incredibly hard on implementing this new functionality into Day One and we’re excited for you to use it. For information on adding your phone number to your journal, check out the Text Messaging to Day One Help Guide.

The post A Journal You Can Text appeared first on Day One | Your Journal for Life.

Go ahead and open up the Day One app on your device and do a search for words such as “pandemic,” “unprecedented,” “social distancing,” and “coronavirus.” Our guess is that prior to February or March of 2020, this unique vocabulary was all but nonexistent. But if you’ve been journaling regularly this year, these words may now show up across your writing in unprecedented quantities.

Rather than a journal filled with photos and recaps from concerts, big family gatherings, and vacations, this year’s entries likely included talk of quarantine, layoffs, closures, and more. For us personally, our journals have proved therapeutic in a year that has been anything but. Sometimes there’s no one else but the blank pages of your journal to open up to about this bizarre world we’ve all been hurled into. It’s within the privacy and security of your journal that you can open up about your fears, anxieties, frustrations, hopes, and dissolution. There may never be a year quite like 2020 again (at least, we sure hope not!) and having a record of what your experience was like will prove to be a priceless history for yourself or others in the future.

We know everyone’s ready to put 2020 behind us, but before we do, we wanted to take one last look in the rearview mirror at some of Day One’s biggest updates and changes throughout the year.

• Daily Prompts. We believe a prompt a day keeps the writing block away. So in March, we added Daily Prompts to Day One on Mac and iOS. Every prompt may not apply to you or be something you want to answer, but we hope most get the writing wheels moving and help you get your thoughts down in your journal.
• The Today View. Previously called Activity Feed, Today aggregates five journal elements—your location data, calendar events, photos taken, the day’s entries, and On This Day entries—into one convenient place. You can read more about the Today View in our Version 5.0 blog post.
• Widgets in iOS 14 and Big Sur. Now you can interact with Day One right from your home screen.
• A Rebuilt PDF Exporter. This gives you more control over font sizes, excluding media if desired, etc.
• We fixed a pesky book printing issue that was affecting a number of our users. We apologize and are so glad this is no longer a pain point for us, or you.
• My Places! When you grant Day One location permission, it will automatically save the location of your journal entry. With My Places, you can name those locations to be something more personal than an address – Family Cabin, Lake Powell, etc.
• M1 support on Mac.
• Extended Free Trial Length on iOS to 14 days.
• New Safari Extension.
• Trackpad support on iPad.
• Sync Improvements.

To say that 2020 was a big year for iOS and Mac would be an understatement. The list above is just a small collection of the work our team put into the app across the Apple ecosystem. Now, let’s talk about Android for a minute. We know the Day One app on Android doesn’t have feature parity with iOS/Mac, which is frustrating for some users. We wish we could devote more time to Android, but our team is small and it’s a resource issue at this point. We’ve improved sync on Android this year and are still working on resolving other issues as we head into 2021.

As we sign off for the year, we want to thank you for supporting Day One. Your passion for journaling continues to push us to offer the best digital journaling experience in the world. Here’s to hoping for a better and brighter 2021.

Cheers, The Day One Team

(Photo by Long Truong on Unsplash)

The post Saying so long to 2020 appeared first on Day One | Your Journal for Life.

We’ve created four unique widgets to bring some of your favorite Day One features right to your home screen. Add one or all of them, and choose the size that works best for you.

• On This Day – Revisit photos from past years with the On This Day preview.
• Daily Prompt – See the Daily Prompt throughout the day and answer when it’s convenient for you.
• Streaks – Keep track of your recent journaling streak and jump straight to the Calendar View (small widget) or to the Today View (medium widget).
• Today – Quickly see your most recent photos and location history to jump straight to the Today View to create a new entry.

The post Introducing Widgets appeared first on Day One | Your Journal for Life.

Your phone is a phone, sure. But if it has Day One installed, it’s actually a journal. And a camera. And it’s with you every day, ready to capture your life. Which is why we’ve decided to launch the #PhotoADay challenge. It’s simple and you definitely don’t need to be a photographer to participate. Starting September 1st, snap a photo and save it to your journal with the hashtag #PhotoADay. If you’re a Premium member, you can even create a new journal just for this collection of images. You can add a caption or a text entry to your photo, or you leave it as just the photo. You’ll then repeat the process the next day, and the day after, through the entire month of September.

Wondering what you’ll possibly photograph each day? Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Your breakfast
• Your pet
• A family member
• Your best friend
• Flowers
• Fall leafs
• Your outfit
• The car you own or one you want
• Your home
• The TV screen of a show you’re watching
• Your book collection
• Architecture in your town or city
• A landscape from a weekend getaway

We’d love to see what you’re capturing during the month, and using the Share Card makes it easy. Just make sure you tag or mention us when posting to Instagram or Twitter.

30 days. 30 photos. All in Day One. We hope you’ll join us. If you miss a day, don’t worry about it and certainly don’t give up. Just take a photo the next day and keep going. Have questions about anything, we’re always here to help. Happy September and happy journaling.

Day One Team

The post September #PhotoADay Challenge appeared first on Day One | Your Journal for Life.

In a year where news has been predominantly negative, we wanted to announce a bit of positive news from our corner of the world: Day One 5.0 is here and with it comes a number of new features and refinements that make journaling even better. A full number release is a rare event for us, but indicative of big changes or feature additions when we do. Here’s a look back at Day One Version 1.0 through 4.0:

• V1 – we took a dream and made it a reality by launching on the App Store.
• V2 – we added multiple journals and sync.
• V3 – we added audio support and a new editor.
• V4 – we added video support.

For Version 5, we’ve added a number of new features while refining others. Let’s start with the headlining feature: Today. Previously called Activity Feed, Today aggregates five journal elements—your location data, calendar events, photos taken, the day’s entries, and On This Day entries—into one place. Today provides an overview of where you’ve been and what you’ve done, allowing you to journal what matters most in a really convenient way. Today is also the most seamless way to revisit the past, with quick access to On This Day. You can access Today by tapping a date on the calendar, the date in the Timeline, or by tapping Today in the Journal Side Menu.

Next up in 5.0 is The Media Picker, which also happens to be one of the most used features in Day One. It has undergone four key updates:

• Easily toggle between your photo library, the in-app camera, and the video recorder to add photos and videos to your entry.
• We removed the related tab and now group your photo library content by location and time of day.
• Now photos will be added to the entry in the order you select them.
• New zoom buttons in the photo picker help ensure you pick just the right photo.

If you add photos and videos to your journal from within the app, you’re going to find the updates make the process all-together a more enjoyable experience.

With Day One, your entries always stay yours. In 5.0, we’ve rebuilt our PDF Export system to give you even more control over how you export your data. The new PDF Exporter will also allow us to build in more customization and control over the book printing experience, which is an update that will be coming in the future.

Location, location, location. It’s such a vital part of the Day One journaling experience, and now with Named Places, it’s customizable. Have a spot you journal from regularly? Now you can name it and have it automatically applied to past and future entries at or near the same location. From within Today, tap on the list of Places, select one, and choose “Name this location.” (Additional Named Places controls and UI improvements are coming soon.)

Last of all, we’ve added Sign in with Apple. Sign in with Apple functionality makes it easier for you to create a Day One account, without having to worry about additional passwords or logins. Existing users who want the simplicity of Sign in with Apple can convert their account over for future authentication.

We’re excited to finally get 5.0 into your hands. If your app hasn’t updated already, you can head to the app store to update manually. Enjoy and keep on journaling.

–The Day One Team

Related:

• Today view Guide
• Day One Releases 5.0 Update for iOS & Mac by The Sweet Setup

The post Day One Version 5.0 appeared first on Day One | Your Journal for Life.

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?

The post Day One is Your Personal Microjournaling Platform appeared first on Day One | Your Journal for Life.

This year has not been kind to the habits, patterns, and routines you had previously established for yourself. Instead of waking up and going to the gym, you now do yoga in the front room. Rather than meet a friend for coffee at a shop around the corner, you brew your own batch in the kitchen. And that long commute you used to make downtown on the train? Now you simply go downstairs.

All of this is to say, if you had a journaling habit as part of your daily routine, it’s quite possible it has been altered or eliminated. Rather than wait for your previous routine to return, now is the perfect time to establish or reestablish a journaling habit as part of a new routine.

In Atomic Habits, James Clear teaches a principle called “habit stacking.” “Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location, you pair it with a current habit.” If during your old routine, after boarding your morning train to work you opened the Day One app, you were practicing habit stacking. If a train ride is no longer part of your day, you will simply need to stack journaling with another habit you have. For example:

After I pour my cup of coffee each morning, I will journal for one minute.

After I finish eating my toast, I will journal one photo.

After I get out of the shower and wait for my hair to dry, I’ll respond to the Daily Prompt.

James goes on, “The key is to tie your desired behavior into something you already do each day. Once you have mastered this basic structure, you can begin to create larger stacks by chaining small habits together. This allows you to take advantage of the natural momentum that comes from one behavior leading into the next.”

Up to this point, we’ve been talking about a morning routine, but this is just an example. In fact, the great thing about journaling in Day One is that it can be stacked with any habit, at any point during your day. Here are a few more examples:

When I sit down to go to the bathroom, I’ll open up Day One instead of Instagram.

When I clock out at the end of the day, I’ll respond to my custom template, “How was work today?”

When I sit down to sing and rock the baby to sleep, I’ll hit record in the Day One Apple Watch app.

When I finish my workout, I’ll quickly make a voice note of the exercises I did.

As you can see, these examples aren’t dependent on a particular time or location, but rather another habit. If you say, “I’m going to journal for 10 minutes every day at 10 a.m.,” you will most likely find the habit difficult to maintain for long because, depending on the day, you might be driving at 10 am, on a work call, or feeding your hangry toddler a snack.

If your journaling was stacked with a habit that no longer exists as a result of the pandemic, try jotting down other habits you still have or the new ones you’ve recently started. Pick one (or multiple) that feels like the best one to stack with, and then write the phrase “When I _____, I will _______.”

Habit Stacking is just one of the incredibly helpful tips James Clear teaches in his book, Atomic Habits. Pick up a copy, you won’t regret it. Also, follow @dayoneapp on Instagram for journaling inspiration and Day One tips.

The post Trying to Establish a New Routine? Try Habit Stacking. appeared first on Day One | Your Journal for Life.