Finding Any Memory: Calendar, Search, and Tags

Writing is the part everyone thinks about. Retrieval is the part that determines whether the diary is worth anything in three years. These are the three routes back into your entries, and when each one is the right tool.

The calendar, when you know roughly when

The calendar view is for time-shaped questions. "What was I doing around the move?" "How did last December actually go?" You know the neighbourhood of the date, not the date.

It is also the fastest way to see the shape of your own habit — filled stretches, gaps, the weeks you were too busy to write. That picture is information in itself, and it is usually more motivating than a streak counter, because a gap in a calendar looks like a busy month rather than a failure.

Search, when you remember a word

Search is the right tool when you remember something specific from the entry itself: a name, a restaurant, a phrase you used. It works offline, because it runs against the entries on your device rather than a server.

A practical trick: search for the concrete nouns rather than the feeling. You are much more likely to have written "the ramen place near the station" than "felt anxious about the move," even if the second is what you are actually looking for. Find the detail, and the context arrives with it.

Tags, when you want a thread rather than a day

Tags are the only one of the three that requires you to do something *now* for a payoff *later*, which is why most people skip them and later wish they had not.

The use case is different from search: search finds an entry, tags collect a thread. Every entry tagged travel, every entry about a particular project, every therapy session. Filtering by a tag turns a pile of days into a narrative you can read straight through.

A tagging scheme that survives contact with reality

• Keep the set small. Five to ten tags you actually reuse beat forty you invented once. If you cannot remember your own tags, they will not be applied consistently, and inconsistent tags are worse than none.
• Tag categories, not moods. The mood field already handles feelings and feeds the statistics. Use tags for the kind of thing an entry is: work, travel, health, family.
• Reuse the exact string. travel and Travel and trips are three different threads. Pick one and stick to it.
• Tag the entries you will want to find in a group. Not every entry needs one. Most do not.

Write for the person doing the searching

The single biggest improvement you can make to retrieval happens while you are writing, not while you are looking. Include one concrete, searchable detail in every entry — a place name, a person's name, what you ate, the thing you were reading.

"Had dinner with Jimin at the ramen place near Seomyeon" is findable from a dozen different angles years later. "Nice dinner with a friend" is findable from none of them, and describes a day you will not recognize when you read it back.

Getting it out

When what you want is not a single entry but the whole thing in another format, Settings → Local data has Export and Export to PDF. The PDF carries the entry text along with its emotion and tags, which makes it a reasonable way to print a year or hand a stretch of entries to someone.

It is also the honest answer to "what if I stop using this app." Your entries should be able to leave, and a diary you cannot get out of an app was never really yours.