May 15, 2026
Should you re-read your old journal entries?
Yes — but not in the way most advice suggests. When and how to do it matters more than whether.
Read →Notes
Short thoughts on writing.
Occasional essays — on journaling, on AI as a companion, on what we’re building and why.
May 15, 2026
How to start journaling again after a long break.
Six months, three years, ten — doesn’t matter. The way back in is smaller than the way back was last time.
Read →May 15, 2026
Why gratitude journaling doesn’t always work.
Gratitude journaling has good research behind it. It also has a failure mode the research papers don’t mention.
Read →May 15, 2026
Five-minute journaling: is it enough?
Short answer: yes. Long answer: it depends what you’re trying to get out of it.
Read →May 15, 2026
Journaling through anxiety without spiraling.
Writing about anxiety can either dissolve it or amplify it. The difference is in how you structure the writing — not how much you write.
Read →May 15, 2026
AI journaling and privacy: what to look for.
If you’re going to journal into an AI, you should know what happens to your words. Here’s the short guide.
Read →May 15, 2026
Voice journaling: when speaking beats writing.
Some thoughts come out wrong on the keyboard and right when spoken aloud. Here’s when to switch.
Read →May 15, 2026
What to write when you don’t know what to write.
The blank-page moment is the most common failure point in a journaling habit. Here are five honest answers to “what now?” that aren’t cheerful prompts.
Read →May 15, 2026
Morning vs evening journaling: does it matter?
The internet has strong opinions about this. Here’s a calmer take: pick the time you’ll actually show up at, and switch when you stop.
Read →May 15, 2026
How to start journaling when you’re depressed.
The advice you usually get assumes you have energy to spare. You don’t. Here’s a smaller, more honest place to start.
Read →May 14, 2026
Why I built Yewmark.
I'm a developer who cares for an older family member every day and runs a handful of small projects on the side. This is the quiet origin story of a journaling app named after one of the oldest living things in Britain.
Read →May 14, 2026
What we don't measure.
No third-party analytics. No tracking pixels. No session replay. A list of what Yewmark deliberately doesn't collect — and the one small thing we do count, which is page views in aggregate.
Read →May 13, 2026
Four voices, one guardrail.
Four AI personalities, one shared system prompt, three layers of deterministic safety wrapped around a small open-source model. The personalities were the easy part.
Read →May 13, 2026
How Yewmark is built.
A single VPS, three principles that ruled out a lot of fashionable tech, and a multi-provider LLM router with prompt-leak canaries layered on top.
Read →May 13, 2026
On friction-free writing.
One rule on the write page of Yewmark that nothing is allowed to break. It killed a lot of features it would have been easy to ship.
Read →May 12, 2026
Why “Yewmark.”
A yew tree grows a few millimetres a year. A whole human lifetime is one ring among many. That’s the image behind the name.
Read →May 12, 2026
What we won’t add.
Every product accumulates feature requests. Here’s what we’ve decided to leave out of Yewmark, and why.
Read →May 12, 2026
Why slow.
Most journaling apps assume the problem is showing up — so they bribe you with streaks. We left that out on purpose.
Read →