I've been journaling on and off for about 5 years and the same thing keeps happening. I open the app, see the blinking cursor, write a wall of text I never reread, or I just close it. My past entries become a dead archive I never go back to.
Started building a journaling app this year as a side project, mostly to fix my own problem. The thing I keep coming back to is how I already think about my life in terms of quests.
There's the main quest, the big arc I'm on right now, the thing my life is fundamentally about this year. Then there are the side quests, the smaller arcs that run in parallel.
The black belt in karate I never finished is a side quest I keep deferring.
That shooting range membership I said I'd sign up for and never did is another.
My move to a new city last year was a side quest that became a main quest.
The friend I see twice a year and have known since I was 15 is a recurring character in all of it.
So I've been playing with a journal where those things become first-class objects. You write your day normally, like any other journal. But you can also link your entries to your main quest, your side quests, and the recurring people in your life. When you reread an entry from 8 months ago, you see every other entry connected to the same quest, and how that arc has actually progressed. Your therapist, your sister, the coworker you have a complicated thing with, all become characters with their own thread running through your journal.
To be clear: this is NOT a gamified to-do list. There's no XP, no levels, no character sheet, no gaming aesthetic. It looks and feels like a clean modern journaling app. The quest vocabulary is just a framing that matches how a lot of people already talk about their lives ("main character era", "side quest day", etc.).
Linking would be manual by default, with optional AI suggestions later for people who want them. Three things I'm trying to figure out: Does framing your life as quests resonate with how you actually think, or does it feel forced?
Has anyone wanted something like this and not found it? What did you end up using instead?
Would the quest framing make you more likely to actually reread your old entries, or is that wishful thinking?
Not selling anything, no waitlist, no link to drop. Genuinely trying to figure out if this is worth building.