Making "Homework for Life" Frictionless

"Homework for Life", coined by Matthew Dicks in his book, Storyworthy, is an exercise to help you find stories by examining your everyday life. Dicks believes that stories are found in the small moments in our lives, even on the most banal days. These small moments weave a rich tapestry over the course of our lives. It is up to the individual to plot these moments and make the connections.

"Homework for Life" is a simple journaling exercise. It works like this: at the end of every day, jot down the date and one moment that happened today that could be told as a story. Do this every day. Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, months into years, and before you know it you will have a rich document of memories.

If you're an iPhone user, here's an Apple Shortcut to make this daily practice frictionless: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/55ab695885f64df5b17960d31e47fca2

How it works

Shortcuts is an iPhone/iPad/MacOS app from Apple. Different apps on your iPhone provide ways to interface with the Shortcuts app, which lets you easily chain app actions.

This shortcut does the following:

1. Sets up a nightly notification
2. Notification opens. Type in your story.
3. Tap "Done" and it saves today's date and your story into a spreadsheet.

Why is this necessary?

This automates several steps in a repeated process:

1. Remembering to add a story (mental reminder)
2. Opening a spreadsheet (find app, tap to open)
3. Creating a new row (multiple taps to create new row)
4. Entering the date in the same format (multiple taps to enter date)
5. Thinking of and writing down the story

Set up

1. Make the Numbers document

1. Create a Numbers document in your iCloud Drive.
2. Rename the Numbers document to "Homework for Life"
3. Leave the sheet name as "Sheet 1"

2. Download the shortcut

1. Here's the link again

3. Set the automation

1. Open the Shortcuts app
2. Tap the "Automation" tab
3. Tap the "+" button
4. Select "Time of Day"
5. Set a time for end of day, just before bedtime. For me this is 8:30 PM.
6. Select "Run immediately"
7. Leave "Notify When Run" deselected
8. Tap "Next"
9. Select the "Today's Story" shortcut from the list

4. Every night you'll get a notification

1. Write in today's story
2. Tap "Done"
3. It saves automatically to your Numbers document

Now you have a slick daily reminder integrated perfectly into your routine! To better manage your attention economy, disable all app notifications except the essential ones.

Examples

Notification

Shortcut Editor