macOS · Bedtime ritual
NightOwlDiary — three prompts before sleep
End-of-day reflections that take five minutes, stay offline, and leave your mind quieter than you found it. Part of our Crazy apps line — small rituals, not enterprise journaling.
What you get
NightOwlDiary opens at bedtime, asks three short questions, saves locally, and gets out of the way. No cloud sync, no reminders spam, no gamification traps.
Positive recall
“What made you smile today?” — gratitude practice is the single best-studied input for better sleep and lower next-day anxiety.
Name the drain
Capturing what wore you out stops it rattling around your head. Write it once, close the laptop, actually rest.
One-thing tomorrow
Pre-committing to a single morning task reduces decision fatigue and pulls you out of bed with a target already set.
Streaks that calm
A subtle seven-day strip. No badges, no leaderboards — just enough signal to keep the ritual going.
Private by default
Every entry lives in a local SQLite file. Offline-first. No account, no telemetry, no AI reading your thoughts.
Five minutes max
Designed to be closed, not opened. Three prompts, three short answers, one enter key — done.
The three prompts
The same every night. Simplicity is the point.
Smile
What made you smile today? Tiny or huge, capture one bright moment.
Drain
What drained your energy? Naming it so you can set it down.
Tomorrow
One thing you want to do tomorrow. Specific and actionable.
Install
Open the disk image, drag NightOwlDiary.app into Applications, then eject the volume.
- If Gatekeeper blocks: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open anyway.
- If needed: xattr -cr ~/Downloads/NightOwlDiary-1.0.0.dmg then open again.
- Entries are stored at ~/Library/Application Support/NightOwlDiary/.