Blog —
Questions to Ask Yourself, One a Day
The day is done, the journal is open, and the page is white all the way down. Something happened today. You were there for all of it. You just can’t find the first sentence.
A blank page asks everything at once: what happened, what it meant, what you want to keep. Most nights that is too much to answer. One small question asks for one thing, and one thing is usually enough to get the pen, or the thumb, moving.
The list of a hundred questions
Long lists of questions to ask yourself are easy to find, and lovely to read. They are harder to use. You scroll, you pick one, you wonder whether the next would have been better, and the page stays blank while you shop for the right question.
There is no right question. There is today’s. The whole trick is to stop choosing.
What makes a good question to ask yourself
A good question to ask yourself is small enough to answer tonight and honest enough that only you could answer it. It is usually ordinary: about today, a person, something you noticed or something you want. Answered day after day, the answers turn into a record of your life in your own words.
Today’s question, at the top of the Diary page
In DayBloq, the page to write on is the Diary page, and Today’s question sits at the top of it. Tap Use this and the question is added to your writing, so the answer has somewhere to start. Skip it, and it’s only a line at the top of the page. Your words are saved as you type.
The questions come in packs, picked on the Questions sheet. The Every day pack is free: 31 questions, one for each day of the month. The question follows the date, so the 4th of every month asks the same thing: “Describe today in three words.”
From the Every day pack (free)
- On the 1st: “What made you smile today?”
- On the 8th: “What did you notice today that you usually miss?”
- On the 9th: “What would make tomorrow a good day?”
- On the 13th: “What’s one thing you want to remember from today?”
- On the 20th: “If today had a color, what would it be?”
- On the 27th: “What’s one thing you can let go of today?”
- On the 30th: “What did you do today that felt like you?”
- On the 31st: “What would you tell yourself from this morning?”
None of them needs a long answer. “Describe today in three words” takes three words. That is a whole entry, and on a tired Tuesday it might be the best one of the week.
Deeper ones, in the Know yourself pack (VIP)
Know yourself is one of the packs that come with VIP, DayBloq’s optional subscription. Its questions go slower and further:
- “When do you feel most like yourself?”
- “What do you believe now that you didn’t a year ago?”
- “What does a perfect ordinary day look like for you?”
- “What’s a choice you’re glad you made?”
- “What could you talk about for hours?”
The other VIP packs are Gratitude, Create and Memories. There are 30-day challenges too, such as “30 days to know yourself”, which asks a pack’s first 30 questions in order, one a day; one challenge is free each season. What VIP costs is on the FAQ. The Every day pack stays free, and so does the Diary page.
What a question can’t do
These are everyday questions. They aren’t a test, nobody grades the answer, and the app won’t tell you what your answers mean. A question won’t make a hard week easier. What it can do is get one true sentence onto the page on a night when you had none, and a year of those sentences is worth more than it sounds.
How to start tonight
- Add a Diary page to a journal. It’s free, and so is Daily Log, another page to write on.
- Read Today’s question. Tap Use this, or just answer it in your head first.
- Write one line. One line counts.
- Miss a night and nothing piles up: tomorrow has its own question. Begin again on the next one.
If you’d rather keep a digital journal on the phone you already carry, DayBloq is on Android.
Next in this series: some days the words won’t come at all, and that’s when a color does the work. Next, ideas for a Year in Pixels: twelve things to track besides how you felt.