Why we went ahead and created an Emoji Journal…

Emojis really do say a lot. There’s plenty to decipher when someone uses 🙂 instead of 😃

A triplet of 😂😂😂 works instead of a “Hahaha” or “OMG, this is hilarious!”

This is why we decided to choose 8 emojis relevant to our daily lives and create a journal that works on the principle of “punch now, write later.”

But this is not how it started.

Red dot, another red dot, more red dots…

Initially we wanted to track activities and our first thought was:

“Let’s make a simple app where we tap on a red dot 🔴 to log life activities and then write more about it later.”

Too many of these red dots would make it difficult to understand what happened that day — we don’t have sharp memories, TBH.

This WTH idea about dots ran under the project name Dwoth, and then we decided to switch to emojis.

Why use emojis to journal anyway?

Emojis are easy to identify 9/10 times.

Using 8 of them felt like the right amount to use.

Not too less to become a red dot situation, not too many to confuse users.

“But isn’t it like a life tracker?”

Even though Dwoth logs life activities as accurately as possible, we believe in people looking at their progress at the end of the day and writing about it.

Could be a few words, could be a paragraph.

It can of course work as a “second brain” software, though we still want you to journal your life like you would in a diary.

Journaling helps you to reason your choices, understand how close you are progressing and the next steps you need to take to acheive your goals.

So why these eight emojis?

We wanted users to log what they are most likely to do during their day.

🍪 Cookie: tracking eating habits.

📕 Book: reading books, articles, etc.

💪 Strength: working out, burning those calories.

⚽️ Football (soccer): indulging in sports related activities.

🌸 Flower: meditation, listening to music, resting.

🚗 Car: travels on train, buses, cars, ships, etc.

💼 Briefcase: work related tasks you accomplish along the day.

We had to take some tough decisions, like excluding the 💸 emoji for expenses and the 🥛 emoji for staying hydrated — mainly because there were plenty of other apps that did the same.

Our current drawbacks

Dwoth is a web app at the moment, mainly because we are broke and bootstrapped.

You can add it to your home screen as a shortcut until we make enough to push out an app for iOS and Android. Maybe a WatchOS app will help too.

We also allow for 50 free journal entries in a day. If you would like more, you can subscribe to the Premium version that offers unlimited journal entries for $4.99 per month.

Too long; didn’t read

We created an emoji journal so you can write about your life better. 😁

Try Dwoth here.