A journal experiment for lazy writers

How and why to keep a daily sound log in 2026

Collage by me, 2025.

Time is a ride you cannot get off¹, but it is a ride you can slow. I slow time by marking it. For much for 2025, I kept a daily journal. Just a couple of lines about one thing that happened: a funny thing someone said, or a delicious thing I ate for dinner.

In the middle of the year, my partner and I sat down and shared what we’d written. For each day, we picked one small detail and wrote it on a giant wall planner we keep in our kitchen. Looking back across the first half of the year, our life felt more densely packed than it had living it. Time expanded. I felt pleasantly lost in it.

In 2026, I’m trying a different journal experiment to mark time: keeping a sound journal.

I had initially thought to do this by using my voice notes app but then I realized that analog is back, baby! It’s 2025 and we have never been more nostalgic for the 90s. I plan to use one of these bad boys:

The experiment will be to record ~20 seconds of audio every day until a tape is full (two tapes per year). Then, at the end of the year listen back to this sort of sound tapestry, one day’s recording bleeding into the next day and into the next.

I don’t know what this will do to my sense of time. It might be disorienting. It might be toxically nostalgic. It might do what the written journal did and make time expansive. Whatever it does, I believe it will be wild and delightful to listen back.

Because of this, I’m inviting you all to join me in this funny little experiment.

Imagine! A distributed, analog archive of our collective years, each entry listened to perhaps only once by one person. There’s something so pointless and magical about that.

Join me?

<3 Lucy

1. Think about that a little too long in the middle of the night. I dare you.