Re-reading Matthew Dicks’ Storyworthy is what convinced me to make this most recent attempt to create a story vault.

(Which I wrote to you about yesterday.)

If you’ve never read the book, I highly recommend picking it up.

Matthew Dicks is a bestselling author, professional storyteller, and 50-time Moth StorySLAM champion—and he details his method for collecting, writing, polishing, and delivering his incredible stories in the book.

Early on, he encourages readers to start a practice he calls “Homework for Life.”

It’s simple.

Every day, Matthew asks himself:

“If I had to tell a story from today—something meaningful, or at least notable—what would it be?”

He writes down one moment from the day. He doesn’t do a whole journal entry, just a sentence or two to capture the memory, so he can develop it later.

This practice does three things.

First, it builds a massive bank of stories you can dip into for inspiration—like we talked about yesterday.

Second, it sharpens your storytelling instinct, and trains your brain to look for those moments of story throughout the day.

Third, it invites you to live in the moment and pay more attention to the present. It slows down time, and creates more breathing room for you to savor the little things.

Matthew Dicks wrote that not every day contained a storyworthy moment for him, especially at first. But the more he did his Homework for Life, the more days did contain a storyworthy moment.

Other people in his life seem to think he can create a story out of anything, he wrote, but: “The truth is this: I simply see more storyworthy moments in the day than most people. They don’t go unnoticed, as they once did.”

Dicks keeps his entries in a spreadsheet, but his students often use apps, notebooks, voice memos—whatever works.

I loved the idea of a searchable spreadsheet, but it was a pain in the ass to scroll all the way to the bottom to add the date, and typing in a Google sheet is annoying—especially on your phone.

So, like I wrote yesterday, I was lamenting to my husband that this practice should be as easy as texting a friend.

And then lightning struck.

Why couldn’t it be?

I started looking into my options:

You could get a Twilio number and use Zapier to integrate with Google Sheets. Or set up a WhatsApp or Telegram bot connecting the sheet with IFTTT. Or…

No.

Way too complicated.

In the end, the simplest solution turned out to be A) free and B) under ten minutes to set up.

Here’s what I did.

(You can do the first part of this on either a desktop or your phone. For a more detailed tutorial including screenshots from my iPhone, head here.)

Step 1: Create a Google Form

Go to forms.google.com and create a new form. Call it Story Finder, and create a single “long form” type question. Label it whatever you want. (Mine says, “What happened today?”

Hit publish, then go to share settings and make sure it’s restricted just to you.

Step 2: Link a Google Sheet

Next, go into the Responses tab and hit the little Google Sheet icon to create a new linked spreadsheet.

This will dump every response to this form into an easy-to-search spreadsheet.

Step 3: Create a shortcut on your phone’s home screen

Finally, copy the link to the form, open it in your phone’s browser, and create a shortcut to that website on your phone’s home screen.

This should create an icon that looks just like an app.

Step 4: Collect stories

To enter a story, just click the shortcut icon to open the form. Enter your story in the field, then hit submit.

And there you go!

As easy as texting a friend.

Action: Go set up a spreadsheet now. Then, set an alarm on your phone and every day just jot down a story.

So, that’s it. That’s the system.

If you stick to it, you’ll be surprised how quickly it becomes addictive.

You’ll find yourself grabbing your phone throughout the day to jot down a quick story, which will magically pop straight into a searchable, sortable spreadsheet you can reference any time you need a dose of inspiration.

You’ve got everything you need to start collecting stories—and if you do, I’d love to hear how this system works for you!

But if you want a head start, stay tuned for tomorrow’s email. ;)

Cheers,

Jessie