Every evening
The evening reflection
The evening reflection closes the loop the morning opened. It asks how the day went and what is worth carrying into tomorrow, which is a smaller and more answerable question than the blank page a journal offers.
What it asks
How it went, and what is worth carrying into tomorrow.
- How the day actually went, against what you said it was for
- What is worth keeping from it
- What you would rather not repeat
Why most journals stop in February
A journal asks you to decide what to write before you write it, every night, forever. That decision is the work, and it is the reason the habit collapses: the blank page is hardest on exactly the days worth recording.
A reflection asks instead. The questions are the same every evening, which sounds like a limitation and is the entire point, because an answer you can give while tired is an answer you will still be giving in March.
Repeating the same questions also makes the answers comparable. A year of free-form entries is a year of prose. A year of the same three questions is a record you can actually read something off.
How Crystal asks it
Inside the product.
- Two minutes, and it reads back what you said this morning so the day has a frame.
- Free, every evening, with your full history kept whether or not you pay.
- It feeds the weekly check-in, which is why the weekly one does not ask you to remember the week.