Memory Jar: One Prompt a Day, Kept in This Browser

The jar holds 365 prompts, one for each day of a year. Rather than storing 365 separate sentences, the prompt is assembled from two lists: 20 themes, such as a shared joke or a hard month, and 19 angles, such as what did the other one notice or what is the detail you would never want to forget. Day 300 of the jar is theme number 20 and angle number 15, which produces the prompt you see on the page: a plan for next year: what would you keep?

Because 20 and 19 share no common factor, the pairing walks through 380 distinct combinations before it repeats, so no two days inside a 365 day cycle produce the same prompt. The angle is the part that does the work. A theme alone is too broad to answer, but a theme with a question attached forces a detail: not the trip, but the smell of the train or who else knew about it. That is the whole trick of the tool, and it is why the entry box asks for one day rather than one life story.

After day 365 the jar loops back to prompt 1, which is deliberate. A keepsake jar that stopped after a year would punish anyone who started late, and the year is long enough that a full cycle is a complete record before it repeats.

Entries are written to the local storage of the browser you are using, under a single key. That is the entire storage design, and it has four consequences worth knowing before you trust it with anything you care about.

• One device, one profile. The jar does not follow you to your phone, your other laptop, or a shared computer. There is no sync and no account, because there is no server.
• Clearing site data erases it. Private browsing windows usually discard everything when closed. Clearing cookies and site data usually takes local storage with them.
• Nothing is uploaded. The text never leaves the browser. That is a genuine privacy property of this page, not a promise about a policy elsewhere.
• The export is the real keepsake. The export block at the bottom of the result is plain text you can select and copy, and its header states where it came from so a copy that travels stays honest about where it was made.

If your browser refuses local storage, the page says so rather than pretending, and the export still works for today. That is the honest version of a keepsake tool: a convenience that tells you its own limits instead of hiding them.

The hardest part of a memory jar is not the prompt, it is the discipline of returning to it. A few practical rules that work better than motivation. Keep it under two minutes. One sentence is enough, and a sentence written every day beats a paragraph written every month. Write the version you would want to read in ten years. Specific detail is what makes an entry useful later: the wrong bus, the burnt lasagne, the exact words somebody used. Let the hard days be short. A hard day entry can be one fact and one feeling, and those are often the entries that matter most years later.

Keep the jar visible. Pin the page in a browser tab, or open it with the morning coffee, because a tool you open once a month becomes a tool you never open. And do not skip days silently: an empty day is fine, and it is also information. If you travel, change the today box on return and the prompt will match the day you were actually living.

Finally, keep a copy outside the browser. Once a quarter, select the export text and paste it into a document you both can reach. A jar that only exists in one browser profile is a jar with one point of failure, and the whole point of a keepsake is that it survives a bad week, a broken laptop, and a cleared cache.