Cian Mac Mahon

Six years ago, I was part of a ‘cult’ by the name of Benrik. It took the form of a yearly diary, entitled This Diary Will Change Your Life. It was a little bit of absurdist fun, an art piece. You didn’t write in this diary what you did each day, but the Diary (always capitalised) told you what to do. The Diary started off with daily challenges, but after two years became weekly.

I followed this guide to “extreme life change” for three years, and I think that it had a serious effect on my sense of humour, now. The instructions were written in a deeply dark, dry and sarcastic manner, often hilariously inappropriate. From “Today, discreetly give people the finger all day” to “Today, burn this book in public”, the Diary supplied me with endless good experiences and blog-fodder, and only resulted in me knocking on the door of a religious cult once.

But the Diary served a bigger purpose then this – it gave me somewhere to speak my mind, before twitter. The space for each day was tiny, but this just made me be short and precise. Unlike twitter, my Diaries were private. If I flicked through them now, I’d see bullet-pointed lists instead of paragraphs, sticky notes for when I needed more room, but above all, somewhere to be confessional.

Then Benrik stopped.

Since then, I’ve tried multiple times to start a journal. I have bought amazing looking notebooks, made out of canvas, handmade paper and leather stitching, and failed after two weeks each time. For some reason, I just forget in a way that I never did, when it came to the Diary. Until, hopefully, now.

I’ve bought the Day One apps for Mac and iOS, and after three days of playing with them, I hope that these are things to finally get me back into journaling again, years after the Diary finished.

Every single day, it sends a notification to my iPad, iPhone and computer, telling each that it is time for me to make an entry. So far, this nagging has worked. I really hope that it continues working, because as this is probably going to be one of the busiest years of my life (and certainly the busiest of my life thus far) I’d like to keep record of the little things, as well as the bigger achievements and failures.

Day One seems to be pretty brilliant at this. As you can see in the screenshot above, on the Mac it just gets out of the way and lets you right. Hit a button on your menu bar, and you get a little textbox that you can confess your hopes and fears into. It reminds me of the tiny Benrik boxes of yester-year. Maybe nostalgia will keep me going.

On the iPhone and iPad, the experience is similar. Except it allows you snap photos, add locations and will even automatically record what the weather was like when you were writing. That’s pretty cool, and might keep me typing on coolness alone!

Oh, and if this doesn’t turn out to be in at least the top 10 busiest years of my life… well, I’m not sure how I’ll survive all that much longer.

We’ll revisit Day One on November the 25th, that’s 25 days from now, or if we count from the day that I began, 28 days later.

I’m setting iCal to nag me right now.