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What Homework for Life actually asks you to do

Matthew Dicks has published the method in his own words: one daily question, a few sentences, about five minutes. Here is that record, and where One Story Moment differs.

One Story Moment is built around a practice Matthew Dicks named Homework for Life. His account of it is public. This post stays inside that account: what he says the practice is, what he says it is not, and the places this app deliberately does something else.

It is not his app. He sells a separate Homework for Life product on his own site. We are not affiliated with him.

The question he actually asks

In a January 12, 2015 essay, Dicks described sitting down before bed for five minutes and asking:

"If I had to tell a five-minute story onstage about something that happened to me today, what would that be?"

He then looked for one defining moment from the day. He wrote that the moment was often unspectacular, and that the point was still to find something that made the day different.

By 2018, in an Author Magazine essay, the question had shifted wording and kept the same job:

"If I had to tell a story from today, no matter how benign or ordinary it may seem, what would that most storyworthy moment be?"

In March 2020 he shortened it again, on his own site, to "What is my most storyworthy moment from my day?" He glossed that as: what made this day different, and which moment would you tell if you had to tell something.

The through-line in his published descriptions is one moment, chosen on purpose, written down the same day.

What he writes down

He has been consistent that this is not a full story. In the 2015 essay he said he recorded the moment in an Excel database, "usually with a couple of sentence fragments of description. Just enough detail to remind me of the story later on."

In the 2018 essay he described the same spreadsheet: column one is the date, column two is stretched across the page, and he writes enough to remember the moment. He gave an example of the length he means:

"I dropped my keys onto my foot at the gym and a woman picked them up and handed to me. She might have been an angel. I am definitely not but maybe I could be better."

He called that "two or three sentences at most" and "every day without fail."

On his current Homework for Life page he says he assigned himself the practice in 2012, while he was running out of new stories to tell onstage. He hoped to find one new story a month. The page's own instructions are still small: "Spend 5 minutes each day writing down one or more meaningful moments. A few sentences a day."

Where he wrote it up

The method is also a chapter of his book Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling (New World Library, 2018). The Google Books table of contents lists "Chapter 3: Homework for Life." This post does not quote that chapter. The essays above are the descriptions he published himself, in public, before and around the book.

In the 2018 essay he also said the most important part of finding a story, for him, is finding the right one. Homework for Life is the part of his teaching that is about noticing, not about stagecraft.

What he says a diary does not do

The 2015 essay draws a line that matters if you are choosing a journaling app. A diary, he wrote, can hold thoughts and feelings. It does not demand that you find a story. Homework for Life, in his telling, insists on a defining moment from the day.

He illustrated that with ordinary entries he still remembered years later: making hot dogs and macaroni after a hard day, explaining the Rolling Stones to his daughter, walking the dog in the snow. He presented those as memories the log preserved, not as proof of a clinical outcome.

He also reported, in that same essay, that about a dozen of the students he had taught that year kept the exercise, out of more than 100, and he called twelve "a pathetic number." That is his classroom anecdote. It is not a study.

What One Story Moment takes, and what it does not

We borrowed the assignment: one prompt, one moment, a short note, the same night. The app is designed to finish in about two minutes. Dicks describes five. Two minutes is our product choice. It is not a number from his essays, and it is not a research finding. The next post is about the habit study people usually cite when they want a number.

We also do not promise his results. He has written that the practice changed how he sees his days, slowed time down for him, and filled a list of stories. Those are his reports about his own life. A journaling app cannot honestly turn them into a guarantee.

Privacy is the other difference. Stories in One Story Moment stay on your device by default. Optional sync, if you turn it on, uploads ciphertext you can decrypt, not a diary we can read. His product makes its own privacy claims. Ours are in the privacy policy.

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