1Start with how the day felt
The Journal tab always opens on today, and the first thing it asks is "How's today?" Five moods, one tap: Rough, Low, Okay, Good or Great. Tap the one you picked again to clear it. Below come the day's journal entries, then its gratitudes.
The arrows step back a day at a time, and tapping the date opens a calendar for anything further back, so a missed evening is easy to catch up on. It never goes forward past today, because there's nothing to reflect on yet.
The daily mood isn't only on the Journal tab:
- Agenda shows it as a chip beside the day's heading, and you can set it there for today or any earlier day.
- Siri and Shortcuts: "Log my mood in Dawnlet" sets today's mood, or use the Log Mood action in a Shortcut.
- Agenda's calendar can show each day's mood instead of its item dots. Choose Daily mood in Settings › Agenda.
Check in every evening, even on days you don't write. One tap a day is what builds the mood streak, and it's what Patterns Plus uses to show how your mood moves with your habits, time and spending.
2Write little and often
Tap "+" on the Journal tab and choose Journal entry. A day can hold as many entries as you like, each with its own time, so a thought at lunch doesn't mean reopening the morning's page.
| Part of an entry | How it works |
|---|---|
| Name | Optional. Leave it blank and the entry is listed as "Untitled entry" |
| Entry | The writing itself, with bold and italic |
| How was it? | An optional mood for this entry alone |
| When | The date and time, set to now on the day you're viewing |
| Category and tags | The same ones you use across Dawnlet, and its own colour and icon if you like |
The day's mood and an entry's mood are different things. The day's mood is one tap about the whole day, and it exists even when you write nothing. An entry's mood is about that one piece of writing. It's the entry moods that colour the journal's month chart (Play 5).
Don't wait for a whole page. A two-line entry with no title is a perfectly good entry, and several short ones a day read back better than one you never got round to writing.
Entries also appear on Agenda under the day they belong to, alongside the day's gratitudes and meals. Write in either place and it shows up in both.
3Capture from anywhere
Some entries start somewhere else: an article, a photo caption, a quote. Share it to Dawnlet and choose Journal entry. What you shared becomes an entry for today, with the title you give it and the link, if there was one, in its text. Dawnlet adds it the next time you open the app.
Journal entries never count towards any limit, whether you write them, share them or add them from Agenda.
4Find anything you wrote
The full journal is one tap from the Journal tab (the books button by "+"), or from the Journal tile in Browse. It shows a month at a time, newest first, and its search field Free sits at the bottom. Search isn't limited to the month on screen: it looks through every entry you've ever written, titles and text.
| Type | Finds |
|---|---|
| lisbon trip | Entries with both words |
| "first day" | That exact phrase |
| beach OR lake | Entries with either word |
| holiday -work | Holiday entries that don't mention work |
Search understands word endings, so looking for "walk" also finds "walking" and "walked".
Write the names of people and places in full. A year from now, searching "Grandma" or "Lisbon" pulls up every moment you wrote about them, in seconds.
5Look back on this day
On this day Plus puts the entries you wrote on today's date in earlier years at the top of the full journal. Without Plus you'll see a single row explaining it instead, and everything else stays open: writing, reading and searching every entry are free.
There's an On this day Home Screen widget too Plus, in the medium size. It shows a short excerpt of something you wrote on this date in an earlier year, never the whole entry.
Turn on Insights Plus on the full journal and each month gains a chart: one bar per day, its height the number of entries (up to 5+) and its colour the mood of the last entry that day that had one. Four numbers sit under it: your current streak, your longest, the month's entries and the days you wrote. The journal also feeds Reports and Look Back Plus. Look Back counts your entries but never quotes them.
On this day rewards the writing you do now. Every entry today is something you'll read on this date next year, so the habit pays off twice.
6Keep the streaks
Two streaks come from this tab. Your journal streak is days in a row with at least one entry, and your mood streak is days in a row with a mood check-in. Both count back from today, and while today is still open they count up to yesterday. Each keeps its best run too, and both sit on Browse's Streaks screen next to your gratitude streak. Dawnlet deliberately has no combined streak, so a day without writing never costs you your mood streak.
Seven badges come from the journal and the mood check-in. The tiered ones come in bronze, silver and gold:
| Badge | How to earn it | Bronze · Silver · Gold |
|---|---|---|
| Dear Diary | Write your first journal entry | — |
| Storyteller | Journal entries written | 10 · 50 · 200 |
| Daily Pages | Your best journal streak | 7 · 30 · 100 days |
| How Are You? | Check in your mood, once | — |
| In Touch | Days with a mood check-in | 30 · 100 · 365 |
| Weather Watcher | Your best mood streak | 7 · 30 · 100 days |
| Full House | Check in your mood, write an entry and log a gratitude, all on the same day | — |
Streak badges use your best run, so they stay earned after a streak ends. The sample entry a new account starts with never counts, and badges are permanent.
Full House is one evening on the Journal tab: tap a mood, write a line, add a gratitude. Do that every night and three streaks grow together.
§Under the hood
Each entry stores the day it belongs to and the exact moment it was written, which orders the entries within a day. The day's mood is stored separately, at most one per day, which is why it can exist on a day you didn't write.
- Formatting travels light. Bold and italic are saved as simple marks on the text, beside a plain-text copy of the entry. Search and list previews read the plain copy, so finding an entry never depends on how it was formatted.
- Search runs on the server. It reaches your whole archive without downloading it to your phone first, however many years of entries there are.
- On this day is a date match. It looks for entries with today's month and day from earlier years, and nothing from today itself.
- Streaks are worked out, never saved. They're counted fresh from the days you wrote or checked in, so adding an entry to a past day corrects the streak straight away.
Writing, reading, the mood check-in and search are free, with no limit on entries. Plus adds On this day, its widget, Insights, Reports, Patterns and Look Back.