My Life So Far

Setting Up My Life So Far Without Wasting Three Days

I spent about four hours last November trying to figure out why My Life So Far kept dropping my morning entries after a system restore. Turns out the app doesn't handle reinstallation paths well if you move it from your C: drive to another partition without backing up the local database first. That's not something the FAQ mentions. Once I knew that, the whole process took maybe twenty minutes. The software itself is straightforward enough. You install it, create an account, and you're presented with a timeline interface where you log events, milestones, and daily notes. The core idea is building a searchable personal history you can export later. People usually overlook how much of the value comes from the export features — CSV, JSON, and PDF output all work cleanly, which matters if you plan to pass this data down or migrate to something else in five years.

The My Life So Far Workflow Most People Skip

Here is how I actually use it day to day, and it is different from the tutorial on the website. I log in the evening rather than during the day because I found that my recall is significantly better when I write entries before sleep instead of trying to remember things three hours after they happened. The difference in entry quality is noticeable. Entries written at night average about double the detail. The tagging system is where things get tricky if you are not careful. By default, My Life So Far gives you five preset tags like work, personal, health, travel, and finance. Most people just stick with those and never customize them. I created a nested tag structure using the forward slash notation — project/sprint-4, location/europe, status/pending — and that made filtering dramatically more useful. You can filter by any combination of these tags using the search bar, and it returns results in under a second even with thousands of entries stored. The app also has a recurring reminder feature that I set to trigger at 9 PM every night. It sends a notification asking what happened today. This sounds like a gimmick but it actually prevents the common problem of going two or three weeks without logging anything and then feeling like you have nothing to add. With the nightly prompt, I stay consistent and the timeline never has gaps longer than forty-eight hours.

One thing beginners miss entirely is the relationship feature. You can link multiple entries together by using the reference field. I use this constantly for projects — every meeting note, email summary, and decision gets linked back to a master project entry. When I open that master entry, all related items appear below it in chronological order. This replaces about six different folders and three separate documents I used to maintain for the same purpose. The export function deserves more attention than it gets. I run a full export once a month and save it to an encrypted cloud folder. The last time My Life So Far had a server outage that lasted eleven days, having that monthly backup meant I lost nothing. Without it, I would have lost about fourteen months of entries. I wish I had started doing monthly exports earlier. There are real limitations to be aware of. The mobile app is noticeably slower than the desktop version and sometimes fails to sync entries made offline within the expected timeframe. I have had entries that stayed stuck in the sync queue for up to six hours after gaining connectivity again. It eventually catches up, but if you are traveling and rely on offline entry, do not assume everything will merge seamlessly. I keep a secondary plain-text log on my phone as a fallback when I know I will be in areas with poor connectivity.

The search function does not support regex or wildcards, which is frustrating if you need to find entries containing partial phrases or specific patterns. You can do basic keyword matching and date range filtering, but anything more advanced requires exporting the data and searching externally. This is a known gap and the developers have it on their roadmap but there is no estimated completion date. Storage limits are another consideration. The free tier caps you at five thousand entries. If you log daily like I do, that limit gets reached in roughly fourteen months. Upgrading to the paid tier removes the cap and adds unlimited exports, but the pricing is around twelve dollars a month which some people may find steep for what is essentially a journaling app. The free tier is perfectly functional if you are just starting out and want to see whether consistent logging actually fits your routine before committing money. For anyone who wants to try it without paying, the standard download comes from the official website and installs on both Windows and macOS. There is no Linux native version, though it runs acceptably through Wine if you are determined. The Android and iOS apps are available on their respective stores under the same name. Installation on desktop takes about four minutes including the account setup phase.

One practical tip that nobody seems to mention: disable the automatic social sharing option during setup. It is turned on by default and will post summary cards to linked social accounts if you accidentally hit the share button. I did this once and posted a personal health entry to a connected account because the share dialog defaults to public visibility. Turning it off in settings afterward stopped it completely but I do not trust that I will not hit share again by mistake in the future. The interface uses a single-column timeline layout that scrolls vertically. You can switch to a calendar view if you prefer seeing entries grouped by date rather than in pure chronological order. The calendar view is useful for spotting patterns over longer periods. I use it quarterly to review whether my logged events show any correlation between stress levels and specific life domains. If you are the type of person who likes to tinker with data, the JSON export format is surprisingly well structured. Each entry contains a timestamp, tag array, content field, and optional location metadata. I wrote a simple Python script that parses the JSON and generates monthly PDF reports with charts showing entry volume over time. It took me about ninety minutes to build and has saved me hours of manual review work each quarter.

The biggest mistake I see people make with My Life So Far is treating it like a diary where every entry needs to be meaningful. That approach leads to burnout within a few weeks. The best entries are often the most mundane ones — what you ate, who you talked to, which bus you took. Those details become impossible to recall later and the app preserves them accurately in a way your brain will not. I have looked up conversations from two years ago that I had completely forgotten existed and they were there verbatim because I logged them the same evening. Customer support response time averages around fourteen hours based on my own experience and what I have seen in the community forums. They are responsive but not fast. If you hit a bug that blocks your workflow, do not expect a same-day fix. The workaround is usually to check the known issues section on their Discord server where other users share temporary solutions while waiting for official patches. I have been using this consistently for about two years now and the longest uninterrupted streak I have is eleven months. I lost entries during a migration from version 3 to version 4 because I did not run the compatibility check beforehand. The app warned me about this during the update flow but I clicked through without reading carefully. Every entry survived but the formatting on about thirty percent of them shifted slightly. Nothing broken but it looked messy until I went back and re-tagged the affected entries.

The desktop application consumes roughly 180 MB of RAM when idle and uses about 1.2 GB of disk space after a year of regular use. Resource usage is reasonable compared to similar productivity tools and it does not interfere with other applications on my machine. On older hardware with less than eight gigabytes of RAM, you may notice slight lag when loading timelines with several thousand entries, but it is not a dealbreaker. If your main goal is simply recording daily activities without any analysis or export needs, you might be better served by a simpler notebook app or even a basic text file with a consistent naming convention. My Life So Far earns its complexity when you need searchability, cross-referencing, and long-term data portability. Before you invest time into learning the full feature set, consider whether those capabilities match what you actually need versus what sounds useful in theory.