Keeping a one sentence journal

Those of you with children will know that what seems like an eternity stretching before you when they are born, rapidly turns into a twinkling of an eye when you have an eye rolling teenager. I’ve been pretty good at recording the big stuff – birthdays, Christmases, school productions and sports days – both in photos and words down the years, but when I read about keeping a one sentence journal on Gretchen Rubin’s blog, a light bulb went on. (Aside: if you haven’t read Gretchen’s book The Happiness Project I thoroughly recommend it).

The idea of keeping a one sentence journal is that you record the little stuff. The funny things your kids say, the food you currently love, the perfume or eyeshadow you were wearing, the DVDs that are on constant repeat and the music that’s making you dance around the kitchen. For example, my son has just come home from school full of his new discovery – Lidl – and how much cheaper than the corner shop it is, and how much stuff he is going to buy to flog at school with a 25% mark up. Let joy be unconfined – I have the new Alan Sugar on my hands. That’s the kind of stuff I want to record, not least because when he is a multimillionaire I’ll have all the material for a best selling book.

I tried lots of different ways to keep a one line journal – paper diary, a private blog being two – but found that I kept forgetting to put in entries. Days would go by, and then I couldn’t remember what the hell we did a week last Tuesday, or what that funny thing was I was going to write down.

A year ago I discovered Oh Life. Dead simple to sign up for, it emails me every day to ask what I have been up to. A virtual kick up the bum, if you will. You can set the time the email arrives, and when it pings into the in box, you hit reply, type what you want and attach a photo if you would like. In the email it reminds you what you were up to this time last week / month / year, so you can make the appropriate “aw” and “I can’t believe that was a year ago!” noises. All your posts build up on ohlife’s website, you can login to see them presented as a very simple blog format and even export them as a text file. In the last year, I’ve missed one day – when we were travelling overnight from the States. This is the only system that has ever worked for me and it’s all down to having the simplicity of receiving and sending an email every day. Free, and highly recommended.

(Oh, and they have just released a premium service for $2 a month. I’ll be looking into this to see what it offers).