A Year of Homework for Life
Homework for Life didn’t start as a productivity trick. It started as a storytelling exercise from Matthew Dicks, a Moth StorySLAM champion who teaches people how to find stories in ordinary life. His rule is simple: every day, write the date and a one‑sentence summary of a five‑second moment you could someday tell as a story. Not the whole story. Just the moment.
He gives it as homework to his workshop students because storytellers run out of material. The exercise forces you to notice small moments and record them. Over time, that changes how you see your days. Dicks says the pace of life slows down when you do this. You stop losing days.
That’s the origin. I adopted it as a daily habit. One line. No pressure. No perfect narrative. Just the smallest unit of meaning, captured while it is fresh.
After a year, the pattern was loud: the entries were mostly about people. Not work. Not achievements. Relationships. The system did what it promised—it showed me what actually mattered.
The rules that make it work
- One line beats one page. The habit survives because it is small.
- Capture the moment, not the narrative. Meaning shows up later.
- Consistency over intensity. The power is in accumulation.
- Emotion over chronology. Write what felt real.
What a year shows you
Projects are episodic. Relationships are continuous. When you log a year of moments, you see the arc: closeness, distance, repair, warmth, drift. You stop treating people as isolated interactions and start seeing the thread.
This changes how you show up. A random Tuesday is no longer random. It is part of a story you are writing with other people.
The surprise payoff
The biggest surprise was how much I enjoy going back and sharing moments with the people in them. A note becomes a shared artifact. That is not nostalgia. It is maintenance. Relationships stay alive when you notice them and let the other person know you did.
If you want to try it
Make it stupidly easy:
- Write one line at the end of the day.
- Pick the moment that felt most alive.
- Do it even when nothing big happened.
A year from now you will have a relationship ledger. You will be able to see what you value, and share it with the people who made it matter. That is the gift of the habit.