The best thing you can do for yourself in 2026 is to keep a daily diary.
A Simple 5 minute practice that can transform your creative life.
200 million people have this one personal project
One way to think of a diary is as a personal project.
As this personal project takes root, you start to grow roots into the happenings of what Lynda Barry calls the ‘back of the mind’. You could even think about it as antenna that captures the signals of what is in and around us.
The best part about this project is it doesn’t need to take a lot of time.
At the end of this piece I will share a list of tasks, exercises, ideas, for a few different ways you can keep a diary. I’ll also share a space where you can discuss your experience, ask questions and just chat about diaries and how they benefit a creative practice.
I’ve used some form of a diary on and off for over 30 years…
Here’s why I think you need to keep a dairy in 2026
1. A diary is a bank of hopeful ideas
Renowned diarist
has this gentle insight about a daily diary project.“There is a kind of hopefulness to a daily project like this, that I can use time to my advantage, that little simple bits of effort over time, turn into more interesting and complex things”
— Austin Kleon
Simple bits of effort over time, is the most appealing part of keeping a diary.
You can invest a small piece of creative capital and get compound interest for doing so. Even if you write one good sentence a day, that’s over a thousand ideas representing the best thing you could write down each day. In 3 years most of those ideas would have been forgotten if you did not write them down.
But if you did you would be building an amazing asset. Each piece in itself being valuable, but the connections across time provide and additional valuable layer to your ideas.
2. A diary is a place for good and bad ideas
Quality comes from quantity.
There are two almost identical stories that demonstrate this point.
One of a pottery professor and another of a photography professor. In both stories half the class was assigned to produce a quantity of work, while the other half was assigned to create a single quality piece.
Invariably the quantity half produced the better quality.
You need a place to do the quantity, and a diary is that place.
Not every idea or trade secret needs to be broadcast to the internet. I once asked a cartoonist how he posts such consistently good work on the internet, and his answer was, he doesn’t post the bad ones.
If you want quality, work on the quantity.
3. Time Travel
One thing your diary will invariably start to accumulate is mundanity and seemingly tiny insignificant details.
Strangely though, it’s these details especially if logged by hand have a certain power to bring you back in time to the moments you spend writing them. It could bring you back to the delightful combination of emotions that a certain day brought in the case of a daily log. Or in the case of a travel journal it might give you a sense of place. The ability to access such states and senses on demand, are a joy for the layman, but for the artist, they are a kind of super power.
People turn to external sources for references. Keeping a diary lets you research your own experiences and perspectives across time.
And if you haven’t kept a diary, you can still use it as a tool for time travel. You could for example write about what you remember about a particular time in the past.
All memory is made up, you might even try writing a fictional account of the past based on a memory, this is the kind of playful expression you can enjoy in a diary.
4. It’s a good way to bookend your day.
A dairy is a good way to start your day by owning your attention rather than surrendering it to the highest bidder on the internet. This could be by doing something like morning pages or if you’re in a pinch creating a bullet journal entry.
It’s also a good way to end your day, with introspection, confession and gratitude. For this you might simply complete these sentences at the end of each day.
I like…
I wish…
I’m grateful…
5. It doesn’t matter how to keep a diary, it matters that you capture the daily miracle
The format doesn’t really matter, what matters is that you capture a little piece of the miracle that is available to you daily.
And by miracle I’m referring to your particular configurations of atoms, experiences, memories, thoughts and attention of the moment. You will never have this moment again unless you store a small piece of it away.
The miracle is available to you daily, but only for the day.
If you don’t know how to start…
Set a timer for 10 minutes, write the date, and fill a page by any means necessary with words or pictures. Do it again tomorrow.
I’ve created a place for us to discuss diary making and share the results of the exercises here with each other.
Tasks, Exercises, Ideas, Insights, Check-Ins and further instructions
What follows are 7 Artist Actions for you to try.
Generally I suggest spending 10 minutes as a guide, some of these can be done in 5 minutes, for others you might want to take more time. But my recommendation is to allocate 10 minutes daily for each of these exercises, and then see if you want to spend more time on it…
Some of these might become a daily practice, others are tools to use as and when you need them.