It has been a huge regret for me that I have not kept a diary, especially during the most interesting phases of my life such as changes in family or when founding my startups and their critical periods. I had only sporadically written some events down, but never had been able to commit. Memories fade and become unreliable surprisingly quickly!
Two years ago, I received with my wife the biggest news of our life: she was expecting twins! Neither of us had any family history of twins, and being over 40 years old, there was a lot of uncertainty on how things will go (fortunately, my wife’s pregnancy went without complications, and we have enjoyed our very healthy baby boys from the July of last year). I was anticipating a life experience that no money can buy, and this time I had to record it!
At the same time, I was developing new ideas of a personal AI that would know all about you and thus be able to give you much better advice than a generic ChatGPT could. It occurred to me, that the way to teach this AI “sidekick” of your life would be to write a diary with “her”. But — how could I keep on writing the diary, as I had failed to do so before?
The answer was in my past: I was one of the co-founders of the Moves app (back in 2012), which automatically recorded a timeline of your life. At the time its main purpose was to automatically track fitness activity, but already then we had been telling potential investors, that the Moves timeline was a great “backbone of your life”, basis for a diary. With it, it was easy to remember what happened on any given day, relieving the pressure to write a journal every day! (Unfortunately, we were not able to convince investors at that time, but that is another story).
I quickly developed a prototype, and in October 2024 we founded a company and launched early version of the Time Atlas app in May 2025. And it worked: I have been journaling now for almost two years, after so many false starts before! Let’s dig deeper…
Numbers
I have written over 2500 notes (some very short), with a total of over 92,000 words. Curiously, this is just a few hundred words less than in Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal”. I doubt he wrote those words though… My notes are mostly short, and many of them are captions for photos (adding photo captions is something I never did with the Photos app, but do consistently now with Time Atlas).
Why it is easy to keep journaling with the Time Atlas app
For me, it has been hard to start and keep journaling, because of the blank page problem. It is just daunting to write the first words — where to start? In science, this is called the “writer’s block 1, I kept on postponing writing, until I did not remember anymore what to write in the first place. I was not able to build a routine. And I did not want the pressure of having a routine.
Time Atlas resolves this for me. First of all, it keeps track of the places and locations I have been. It is easy for me to recall what happened during a day by just looking at the timeline. Time Atlas also automatically shows photos from my Photos library in the right context: for example, if I was in a restaurant and took pictures, those are shown alongside the visit event, and that is often enough for recalling who I was dining with, and what did I eat. I have been able to write notes to events that happened over 10 years ago (as I imported my data from Moves) by looking at the timelines and photos!
Because Time Atlas automatically records the mundane, I do not need to write that down myself. It even records the weather, and stores calendar events to remind of the meetings that happened. That makes it so much easier for writing down just the significant bits.
Topics I write about
Time Atlas automatically infers #hashtags for the notes, which gives a rough idea of the topics I have been writing about. Not surprisingly, given my new life with the twins, most of my writing is about parenting, family and the kids. I used to write more about my work as well, and those notes are often longer, as they are more reflective.
Granted, most of my notes are factual recordings and not very deep in thought. That’s fine for me, as I simply don’t have much time or energy to do more deep writing now. But sometimes I write also more in-depth thoughts, and it is a huge value for me that Time Atlas keeps the data completely private with end-to-end encryption — not even the employees can read my notes, guaranteed by mathematics, not rules.
Why is it important for me to write?
It is well known that writing a diary, journaling, is good for one’s mental health (there is a lot of research about the topic), as it allows one to offload thoughts and process them. “Writing is thinking” is one of my favourite sayings that I learned during my Ph.D. Personally, I do not write for mental health reasons, but because I believe it will be interesting to come back to my notes in the future – for me and perhaps my offspring. At least I hope so! It makes me feel that life has more meaning when it is recorded in writing. Your life is worth remembering.
I also believe in the vision of having my personal AI that knows so much about me. This is something we are already testing, and it is quite magical to get fully personal advice and comments for my questions. Stay tuned…
