Using Reflect Day
Writing, voice notes, revisiting past entries, and optional AI. A guide to the parts of your journal and how to use them.
Writing
The day is the unit
Reflect is a record of your days, not a form to complete. Write however much you want, whenever it fits.
One day, as many entries as you like
Write once or ten times in a day — a single line or a long page. Short and long are equally welcome; there's no minimum and no daily template to fill.
Mood is optional
Set a mood only when a day actually has one worth marking. Most entries don't need it, and leaving it blank isn't a gap — it's the default.
Write in the present, fill a past day on purpose
A new entry is dated to today, and the composer has no date picker — the journal is about the day you are in. You can always edit older entries. And a day you never wrote about can be filled in deliberately: tap it in the calendar, or on iPhone share a photo of it and the entry opens on the day it was taken. Those entries are marked as written later, so the timeline stays honest about when each thing was written.
How to write about a past day →Where it works best
Everywhere you already are
Reflect is offline-first and cross-platform. It's happiest installed as an app on every device you use, so writing is always one tap away.
Install it as an app
Give Reflect its own icon and window on your phone or computer. Install it for everyday writing, and let your entries sync regularly. Installation does not replace a backup.
Install on your device →On every device you use
Install it everywhere you actually spend time — phone, laptop, tablet. The same journal syncs through your own Google Drive, so it's with you wherever you land.
Works offline
No connection needed to write. Entries save on the device and sync the next time you're online.
Voice notes on the go
From your phone, capture a voice note in a couple of taps — before you even sign in. Next time you log in it becomes an entry dated to the moment you recorded it: with AI on, transcribed into text; without it, the recording itself is kept on the entry.
iPhone
What the iPhone app adds
These lean on things only Apple's OS offers, so they exist in the installed iPhone app and nowhere else.
Hold the app icon
Press and hold Reflect on your Home Screen and three things are one tap away: Write, Voice note and Search. The quickest way in when you already know what you came for.
The Action Button, Control Center, or Lock Screen
Put Reflect there and one press opens a blank entry ready to type; the other starts recording a voice note. On the Lock Screen they take the two buttons along the bottom: open Customize, remove the flashlight or the camera, and choose Reflect in its place. Either way, it's the shortest path there is from a thought to the page.
Or just say it
"Hey Siri, add to Reflect Day" — say what's on your mind and the app opens with those words already in the entry, waiting for you to read them over and save. Nothing is written down without you seeing it first.
A nudge to write
Pick the times you'd like a reminder in Settings, and the iPhone app delivers them — the browser cannot. Each device keeps its own times: nothing about your reminders is synced, shared, or stored anywhere but the phone.
A photo opens the day it was taken
Share a picture into Reflect from Photos, Files, or a chat and the entry opens dated to the day you took it, ready for you to write about that day. It's marked as written later, so the timeline stays honest.
How to write about a past day →Moods land in Apple Health
Turn it on in Settings and every mood you set is saved to Apple Health as State of Mind, at the moment you wrote the entry. Change that mood later and the reading in Health changes with it. Set a mood on an entry from last month and it lands on that day, not today. Only moods you set after turning it on are saved — nothing from before.
Nothing to read in the app switcher
When you leave an app, iPhone keeps a picture of what was on screen and shows it in the app switcher. Reflect covers itself before that picture is taken, so what's there is the app, never your entry. Always on, with nothing to turn on.
Rediscover
Remembering — and what you'd rather not
Reflect can resurface past days on your home screen — a year ago today, and so on. Most of the time that's a quiet pleasure. But not every day is one you want handed back to you, so you're always in control of what comes back.
Memory already softens the past
Left alone, memory tends to be kind. In studies of everyday recollection, the sting of unpleasant events fades faster than the warmth of good ones — a well-documented pattern called the fading affect bias (Walker, Skowronski & Thompson, 2003) — so looking back often feels gentler than living it did. A journal that keeps handing you a specific hard day can cut against that.
Hide a day, or a whole period
From any entry you can hide its day, and from the calendar you can set aside a whole stretch of time. Those days stop resurfacing in Rediscover — no surprise reminder of a hard week when you open the app. With AI on, you can also just ask the assistant to hide an entry from resurfacing — like every AI edit, it's a proposal you review and save.
Hidden, never erased
Hiding only stops a day from coming back on its own. The entry stays exactly where it is — you can read it whenever you choose, and unhide it just as easily. Nothing is deleted, and this is a personal preference, not therapy: if a memory is genuinely traumatic, setting a card aside isn't a substitute for real support.
Your data
Yours, on your devices
There's no backend. Your journal lives on your device and your own Google Drive — which makes one habit important.
No server in between
Entries live on your device and sync to a private folder in your own Google Drive. Nothing passes through us — there's no account with us beyond your Google sign-in.
Log in only from your own devices
The first time you sign in on a computer, Reflect downloads your whole journal onto it. That copy is encrypted, but anyone who can get into your Google account on that machine can open it too. So only sign in on devices you own and trust — avoid shared, work, or public computers.
Encrypted on your device from the start
You don't have to switch anything on: the app makes a key for each device and keeps it in your own Drive, so the copy sitting on disk is never plain text. Set a password and that stored key is deleted — from then on only your password opens the journal, and the password itself is never saved anywhere (AES-256). Either way it protects the entry text; dates, tags, location and the copy in Drive stay unencrypted.
A cover for when you look away
Switch on the privacy curtain and the app covers your journal the moment you switch away or sit idle. Nothing you've written shows through, and it stays there until you lift it yourself — with a tap, or with your password or passkey if you ask it to require that.
AI is opt-in, and fully removable
AI stays off until you add your own Gemini API key; then you can chat with your journal by text or by voice, get tag and cover suggestions, and reflections. Switch it off and every AI surface disappears and the key is removed — the journal stays complete without it. Requests go straight from your device to Google, never through us.
Set up your journal
Install Reflect Day, connect your Google Drive, and write your first entry.
Getting started →