How Long Should a Video Journal Entry Be? The Answer Is in the Rewatching

For a daily video journal, aim for about thirty seconds, and make one sentence the minimum. For a weekly entry, two minutes is plenty. Save longer recordings for milestones: the first day, the last day, and the days something changes.

The reason isn't that you have little to say. It's that a diary is only worth keeping if you'll watch it back, and the length of each entry decides how long that takes. A year of thirty-second entries is about three hours of video. A year of ten-minute entries is about sixty-one hours, and almost nobody will sit through that.

The rewatch maths

Here is what a year of daily entries adds up to at different lengths. The arithmetic is just length × 365.

Three hours is a long film. You might watch it in one sitting at the end of a year; more likely, you'll watch it in pieces, or jump between the first entry and the latest. Sixty-one hours is a box set you'll never start.

This is why Jourvelope caps entries at thirty seconds. It's a design decision, not a technical limit: we wanted the end of a journey to be something you'd actually watch.

Why short entries are easier to keep

Length also decides whether you record at all. The entry you'll make on a tired Tuesday is the only length that matters, and a short one survives bad days that a long one doesn't.

The habit research supports keeping the floor low, though not with a magic number. In Lally and colleagues' 2010 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology, 96 people repeated a daily behaviour of their choosing for 84 days. Exercise behaviours tended to take longer to become automatic than simpler ones like drinking a glass of water, and missing a single day didn't measurably set people back. (The study's famous "66 days" is a median of modelled curves, with individual estimates ranging from about 18 to 254 days. It's a reason not to expect a number, not a target.)

A thirty-second entry is a simple behaviour. A ten-minute one, with its own setup, thinking time and rambling, is a complex one.

Why short entries are still worth having

The worry with short entries is that they're too slight to matter. The evidence points the other way.

In 2014, Ting Zhang and colleagues had students write time capsules about ordinary things: a recent conversation, the songs they were listening to, an excerpt from a paper. Three months later, the students found the capsules significantly more interesting than they'd predicted, and the underestimate was largest for mundane material. The capsules were written, not filmed, and three months is not a decade. But the finding is the right warning for a diary: the ordinary, slight entries are the ones you undervalue at the time.

The BBC learned something similar in the 1990s. Video Nation gave members of the public camcorders for a year, and broadcast their footage as shorts of about two minutes. The short format surprised viewers at first and turned out to be what people remembered. There's a fuller history of the format here.

What fits in a thirty-second video journal entry

More than you'd expect. At a normal speaking pace, thirty seconds is a few sentences: enough for one thing that happened, one thing you noticed and one thing you're going to try. Some examples:

• "Ran 3k without stopping. Calves hurt. Same route Thursday."
• "Couldn't do the chord change again. I think it's my thumb. Trying it slower tomorrow."
• "Bad day. Didn't practise. Recording anyway so I know it happened."

If you can't think what to say, a single question helps more than more time. These prompts are written for exactly that.

When a longer entry is worth it

Short daily entries don't rule out long ones. A few days deserve more:

1. Day one. A baseline: what the goal is, where you're starting, and the thing you can't do yet.
2. Milestones. The first time something works, a setback, a change of plan.
3. The last day. What changed, what didn't, and what you'd tell the person in the first clip.
4. A weekly review, if you like the habit. Two minutes, once a week, is about an hour and forty-five minutes a year.

If you keep long entries, make them rare. A handful of five-minute clips in a year of thirty-second ones are easy to find and worth watching. Long entries every day bury each other.

What it costs in storage

Video takes space, and length decides how much. The exact figure depends on your phone's resolution and format, so check a recent clip's file size. As a rough guide, assuming a phone that records about 100 MB per minute:

• 5 seconds a day is about 3 GB a year.
• 30 seconds a day is about 18 GB a year.
• 2 minutes a day is about 73 GB a year.

That matters if your phone is nearly full, or if your diary syncs to a cloud account with a free tier. Where to keep it, and how to back it up without giving up privacy, is covered in this guide to storing a private video diary.

FAQ

How long should a daily video diary entry be?

About thirty seconds, with one sentence as the minimum. A year of thirty-second entries is roughly three hours of video, which is short enough to actually watch back. Longer entries are worth it occasionally, at milestones.

Is one second a day enough?

It's enough for a film of your year, but not for a journal: one second shows a moment, not what you thought about it. If you want to hear yourself explain something, you need a few sentences, which takes closer to thirty seconds.

How long should a weekly video journal entry be?

Two to three minutes is plenty. A weekly two-minute entry adds up to under two hours a year, which is easy to rewatch.

How much storage does a video diary take?

It depends on your phone's video settings. At roughly 100 MB per minute, thirty seconds a day comes to about 18 GB a year, and two minutes a day to about 73 GB. Check a recent clip's file size to estimate your own. Where to keep it.

Sources

• Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009.
• Zhang, T., Kim, T., Brooks, A. W., Gino, F., & Norton, M. I. (2014). A "present" for the future: The unexpected value of rediscovery. Psychological Science, 25(10), 1851–1860.
• Nahra, C. (1999). Video Nation and Britain's camcorder citizens. Documentary, International Documentary Association.

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