# Steps

> Steps (steps.org) is a journal that texts you first, in iMessage. On the mornings you pick, at your hour, it sends a short, casual text that never asks a question. When you text back, it asks your prompts, or takes whatever you write. Everything you text, any hour, is saved with that day. The web at steps.org is read-only: your history, search, simple counts. No feed, no moods, no AI analysis, no advice. Steps also publishes journal templates at steps.org/templates, built from the journals real people kept, from Marcus Aurelius to Julia Cameron's morning pages, each page saying whether the prompts are the person's words or ours. Tagline: "Journaling that gives you superpowers."

Key facts (each bullet is self-contained and safe to quote):

- The two problems Steps solves. First: "I keep leaving my journal somewhere else" — a notebook in a drawer, in a hotel, in the house you moved out of. Steps lives in iMessage on your iPhone, so it is always with you and as simple as a text message. Second: "What should I think and write about to become a better person?" Steps publishes templates built from the journals of people you admire, each saying whose words the prompts are, so you can try them and keep improving your own prompts.
- How a morning goes: on the mornings you picked, at your hour, Steps sends a short text with no question in it. Text back and it asks your prompts one at a time, or takes free writing. Anything you text that day, any hour, is saved with that day. A one-line answer counts.
- Sign-up offers three templates: the two gratitude prompts (recommended to start), Marcus Aurelius's, and Benjamin Franklin's. They are yours to change — reword them, write your own, switch to any template by pasting its steps.org link into the thread, or turn prompts off and just write — by text.
- Templates are sets of prompts built from journals real people kept, published at steps.org/templates: who kept it, the prompts, how long it takes, and when it does not work. So far: Benjamin Franklin's two prompts, Marcus Aurelius's morning, Oprah Winfrey's gratitude journal, the Ignatian examen, Julia Cameron's morning pages, Ryder Carroll's daily reflection, and James Pennebaker's expressive writing (a four-day course, not a habit). Only one prompt across all of them is the person's own words — Benjamin Franklin's morning one, "What good shall I do this day?" — and every page says whether its prompts are the person's words or ours. Built into Steps today — pick one by text: the two gratitude prompts recommended at sign-up, Marcus Aurelius, Benjamin Franklin, and Julia Cameron's morning pages. The others you can ask Steps about by text and set as your own prompts. Or use one on paper tonight.
- Schedule: anywhere from one morning a week to every morning, at your hour. Daily is the default. A missed morning is a missed morning; there are no streaks.
- A day with nothing written gets one follow-up text in the early afternoon. It is the only proactive text you can switch off. No guilt, no streak-shaming.
- The prompts are a guide, never a gate. A day with no prompts answered is a normal day, not a missed one.
- Steps is a program, not a person, and says so. It never analyzes you or gives advice: it asks the questions, saves what you write, counts your own words, shows you what you wrote when you ask ("what did I write last Tuesday?"), and answers questions about journaling itself. Nothing you write trains AI models.
- Discreet on your own phone: Steps texts from a plain phone number — no caller ID, no business name, no app icon (there is no app). Save the contact under any name you like, and that name is all that shows on the lock screen, the watch, or the car screen. Nothing on your phone says journal.
- Privacy is the reason Steps exists: entries are encrypted, stored in EU data centers, never sold, never used for advertising, never analyzed, never used to train a model. Everything is downloadable and permanently deletable, anytime.
- The web at steps.org is read-only and for looking back: every day you wrote, in your own words; search; simple counts; download; your plan. Journaling itself happens in iMessage, on an iPhone.
- Steps is NOT medical care, therapy, or a mental-health program, and gives no advice. Its guardrails are written down (steps.org/safety): never advice, never analysis, never pep talks, never pretending to be a person, never engagement tricks. The one exception is a crisis, where it points to emergency services and crisis lines (112/911, 988, findahelpline.com) instead. 18+.
- Pricing: the first 30 days are free, no credit card; the free days start when you send the word hi to the number we show you. After that, $5/month (USD only) — about 17¢ a morning — keeps Steps texting, and a card is asked for only then. If you stop, every word stays readable and downloadable at steps.org.
- Compared to the alternatives (their published prices, July 2026): the Five Minute Journal is a $32 paper book that lasts about six months and cannot remind you; Gratitude: Self-Care Journal (free tier, Pro $4.99/mo or $29.99/yr) offers hundreds of prompts, quotes and vision boards in its own app; Day One (free tier, Silver $49.99/yr, Gold $74.99/yr) is an open-ended journal with AI summaries on its top tier. Steps is the quiet option: no app to install, no AI analysing your journal, prompts you answer by text, room to write outside them, and a private record.
- Steps is made by a very small team fronted by Tiago, a father of four living in Porto who has spent a decade building and backing consumer products (Codeplace, the project-based programming school that taught over 100,000 students; portfolio at notacompany.com/portfolio). He kept a journal on paper for years and kept leaving it somewhere else, so he built the one that texts first. The subscription after the free 30 days exists to cover servers and AI tokens — that is the whole business model.
- Steps is built by Not a Company (notacompany.com), the parent organisation behind the Steps brand and product, and is operated by Pipedesk OÜ, a company registered in Estonia (EU) trading under that name. Card charges appear on statements as NOTACO. Contact: tiago@steps.org.

## Pages

- [Home](https://steps.org/): The two problems Steps solves — a journal you keep leaving somewhere else, and not knowing what to write about — with how a morning goes, the templates, privacy, and the free 30 days.
- [Resources](https://steps.org/resources/): Journal templates built from the journals real people kept, and articles about keeping a journal. Every template says who kept it and whether the prompts are their words or ours; every claim is cited to a named source; drafted with AI help and checked by a person before publishing (editorial policy at steps.org/editorial-policy).
- [All articles](https://steps.org/articles/): The complete, paginated index of every article about journaling — the hub above shows only the newest few.
- [What Is Gratitude?](https://steps.org/articles/what-is-gratitude/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/articles/what-is-gratitude.md)): Gratitude is noticing that something good came from outside you. Where the feeling came from in evolutionary terms, why Trivers and Nowak describe it as bookkeeping, why it feels like a debt, and why some people find it far easier than others.
- [Gratitude vs Thankfulness: What the Difference Actually Is](https://steps.org/articles/gratitude-vs-thankfulness/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/articles/gratitude-vs-thankfulness.md)): Most answers to this question are invented on the spot and contradict each other. What McCullough's four facets, the moral-emotion account, and the older words todah and eucharisteo actually say about how gratitude, thankfulness and appreciation differ.
- [Comparison Is the Thief of Joy](https://steps.org/articles/comparison-is-the-thief-of-joy/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/articles/comparison-is-the-thief-of-joy.md)): Theodore Roosevelt never said it. Marcus Aurelius wrote the oldest version of the cure, Quote Investigator traced where the line actually came from, and the research on gratitude and envy points somewhere better than "stop comparing yourself to other people".
- [Gratitude in World Religions](https://steps.org/articles/gratitude-in-world-religions/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/articles/gratitude-in-world-religions.md)): How five traditions train gratitude — Judaism's hakarat hatov and Modeh Ani, Christianity's eucharisteo, Islam's shukr in al-Ghazali's three parts, Buddhism's kataññuta, and Stoic gratitude in Marcus Aurelius — reported in each tradition's own words.
- [How to Keep a Prayer Journal](https://steps.org/articles/prayer-journal/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/articles/prayer-journal.md)): What a prayer journal is and how to keep one — the two-page setup with a requests list and an answered-prayer record, twelve prompts, Richard Foster's spiritual-disciplines lineage, and Philippians' requests-with-thanksgiving shape.
- [Gratitude in the Bible](https://steps.org/articles/gratitude-in-the-bible/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/articles/gratitude-in-the-bible.md)): What the Bible teaches about gratitude — thanksgiving as covenantal response, the todah offering behind the Psalms, Brueggemann's thanks-versus-praise distinction, Paul's "in every thing", and the meal literally named for giving thanks.
- [Bible Verses About Gratitude](https://steps.org/articles/bible-verses-about-gratitude/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/articles/bible-verses-about-gratitude.md)): Twenty-five Bible verses on gratitude and thanksgiving — the Psalms' todah offerings, Paul's "in every thing give thanks", and Habakkuk's harvest-failure praise — grouped by the moment you need them, with a line of context each.
- [Gratitude Affirmations](https://steps.org/articles/gratitude-affirmations/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/articles/gratitude-affirmations.md)): Why gratitude affirmations work when "I am" statements ring hollow — the completed-tense idea traced through Neville Goddard, Esther Hicks and Martin Seligman's three-good-things research, with 40 affirmations to start from.
- [Does Journaling Actually Work? What the Evidence Shows](https://steps.org/articles/does-journaling-work/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/articles/does-journaling-work.md)): Frattaroli's meta-analysis of 146 randomised studies puts the effect at r = .075 — small, real, and smaller than earlier reviews claimed. What journaling helps with, what Zachariae and O'Toole found it did not, and the rumination trap to know before you start.
- [How to Start a Gratitude Journal](https://steps.org/articles/how-to-start-a-gratitude-journal/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/articles/how-to-start-a-gratitude-journal.md)): Three things, one reason why, attached to something you already do. What Lally's habit research says about anchors and the 18-to-254-day range, why Cheng's eight-entry trial still worked, and how often to write given Lyubomirsky's frequency finding.
- [Gratitude Journal Prompts That Hold Up to the Research](https://steps.org/articles/gratitude-journal-prompts/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/articles/gratitude-journal-prompts.md)): Forty gratitude prompts grouped by situation, plus what the research actually supports: Seligman's placebo-controlled trial, the Komase dose finding that four entries or fewer change nothing, and Choi's 2025 meta-analysis putting the effect at g = 0.19.
- [Journaling vs a Diary: What Is Actually Different](https://steps.org/articles/journaling-vs-diary/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/articles/journaling-vs-diary.md)): A diary records what happened; a journal works on it. What 146 randomised studies say about the difference, why Takano and Tanno's rumination finding matters before you start, and where Cameron's morning pages and Carroll's bullet journal sit.
- [Templates](https://steps.org/templates/): Every journal template — who kept it, its prompts (each page says whether they are the person's words or ours), how long it takes, and when it does not work. Built into Steps today, to pick by text: Oprah Winfrey's gratitude journal, Marcus Aurelius' journaling prompts, Julia Cameron's morning pages and Benjamin Franklin's journaling prompts. Any other template you can ask Steps about by text and set as your own prompts.
- [Ryder Carroll's bullet journal reflection](https://steps.org/templates/ryder-carroll-bullet-journal/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/templates/ryder-carroll-bullet-journal.md)): Ryder Carroll (2018), 5 min. Ryder Carroll's Bullet Journal is best known for its bullets and migration, but the part that makes it a journal rather than a to-do list is the daily reflection: looking back at yesterday's log and asking what actually still deserves your attention today. Prompts: "Look back at yesterday. What is still worth your time today, and what quietly stopped mattering?" "Pick the one that matters most today. Why does it matter?" Not for: This is not the Bullet Journal. It is one component of it, and a component that assumes the rest exists - Carroll's reflection reads a Daily Log you will not have here. It is also not a productivity system, and if what you actually need is somewhere to keep tasks, a text thread is a poor place to keep them.
- [Oprah Winfrey's gratitude journal](https://steps.org/templates/oprah-winfrey-gratitude-journal/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/templates/oprah-winfrey-gratitude-journal.md)): Oprah Winfrey (1996 onwards), 5 min. A gratitude journal is the simplest reflective practice there is: write down what you are grateful for, in your own words, regularly. Oprah Winfrey kept one daily for about a decade — five things a day — and says plainly that it fell away when her schedule got the better of her. Prompts: "What are you grateful for today?" "What are you grateful for in life?" Not for: Gratitude journaling turns into performance if you let it — writing what sounds grateful rather than what is true. If you catch yourself composing, the second question is usually the way out. And on a genuinely bad day, forcing it is how people come to resent the practice and stop.
- [Marcus Aurelius' journaling prompts](https://steps.org/templates/marcus-aurelius-journaling-prompts/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/templates/marcus-aurelius-journaling-prompts.md)): Marcus Aurelius (c. 170-180 CE), 5 min. Marcus Aurelius began the day by rehearsing it rather than reviewing it: naming the difficult people he expected to meet, and reminding himself what the day's work actually was. It is a bracing practice, not a comforting one, and it takes about five minutes. Prompts: "Who are you likely to find difficult today, and what will you do when they are?" "What is the work in front of you today that is actually yours to do?" Not for: This is a rehearsal, not a comfort. It braces you for a day rather than helping you sit with one, and it is a poor fit for grief, crisis, or anything that needs gentleness. If naming difficult people in advance makes you dread the day rather than meet it, this is the wrong practice and you should stop.
- [Julia Cameron's morning pages](https://steps.org/templates/julia-cameron-morning-pages/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/templates/julia-cameron-morning-pages.md)): Julia Cameron (1992, and daily since), 20 min. Morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, done first thing in the morning, about whatever is in your head. There is no prompt and no subject. Julia Cameron's whole point is that you write past the interesting part and keep going until the pages are full. Prompts: "Whatever is on your mind right now - start there, and keep going until you run out." Not for: It is not for people who need a way in. A blank prompt is a blank page by another name, and if staring at one is the reason you stopped journaling, one of the question-shaped templates will serve you far better. It is also not a record you will want to reread - Cameron tells you not to.
- [James Pennebaker's expressive writing](https://steps.org/templates/james-pennebaker-expressive-writing/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/templates/james-pennebaker-expressive-writing.md)): James W. Pennebaker (1986, and studied ever since), 20 min. Expressive writing is fifteen to twenty minutes of continuous writing about your deepest thoughts and feelings on a single difficult experience, repeated on four consecutive days and then stopped. James Pennebaker devised it in the 1980s and has written about it ever since. Prompts: "Write your deepest thoughts and feelings about the thing weighing on you. Don't stop to tidy it up." Not for: This is the one method here that can genuinely upset you, and it is meant to be hard — Pennebaker is candid that people often feel worse immediately afterwards. It is not therapy and it is not a treatment. In the middle of a crisis, or with something you are not already supported around, please talk to a person rather than a text thread. See steps.org/safety. It is also not a daily habit, however easy it is to turn it into one.
- [The Ignatian examen](https://steps.org/templates/ignatian-examen-journaling-prompts/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/templates/ignatian-examen-journaling-prompts.md)): the Ignatian tradition (1548, and daily since), 10 min. The examen is a five-point review of the day that Ignatius of Loyola set out in the Spiritual Exercises: give thanks, ask for light, walk back through the hours, face what went wrong, and resolve what to do next. Jesuits have kept it daily for nearly five hundred years. Prompts: "What are you grateful for from yesterday?" "Walk back through yesterday. Where did it turn - for better or worse?" "What will you do differently today?" Not for: Two warnings. If you are practising the examen as prayer, use the real five points and not this - what is missing here is precisely the part that makes it prayer. And the walk back through the hours can turn into rumination for anyone inclined to it: the tradition pairs it with pardon and resolution for a reason, and without them a nightly audit of your own faults is a different and worse thing.
- [Benjamin Franklin's journaling prompts](https://steps.org/templates/benjamin-franklin-journaling-prompts/) ([markdown](https://steps.org/templates/benjamin-franklin-journaling-prompts.md)): Benjamin Franklin (the practice from 1726; the Autobiography written 1771-1790), 5 min. Benjamin Franklin opened each day by asking what good he would do, and closed it by asking what good he had done — his own words, written into the daily schedule he called the Scheme. This template keeps the morning question verbatim and asks the evening one the next morning, about yesterday. Prompts: "What good shall I do this day?" "What good did you do yesterday?" Not for: It is a ledger, and ledgers can turn into scorekeeping. Franklin himself gave up on the timetable, admitting the Scheme suited a journeyman printer more than a man who had to meet people at their hours. If asking what good you did starts producing a list of failures rather than a record of a day, this practice has stopped working and it is worth stopping too.
- [Privacy](https://steps.org/privacy/): "Nobody's business but yours" — our promises in plain words: collect the minimum, discreet on your own phone, a program that knows its place, counts not surveillance, delete means delete.
- [Safety](https://steps.org/safety/): The guardrails in writing — Steps never gives advice, analysis, pep talks, or engagement tricks; in a crisis it hands you to real people (112/911, 988, findahelpline.com); tested against misuse before every release; 18+.
- [Pricing](https://steps.org/pricing/): The first 30 days are free, no credit card; $5/month (USD only) if you want more — about 17¢ a morning.
- [FAQ](https://steps.org/faq/): How Steps works, what it asks (you pick a template at sign-up, yours to change), whether you have to answer (no — they are a guide, not a gate), how often it texts, a morning with no reply, what happens after the free 30 days (every word stays readable), privacy, and whether it is therapy (no).
- [About](https://steps.org/about/): Who makes Steps and why — a very small team fronted by Tiago (father of four, Porto; notacompany.com), who kept his own journal on paper for years and kept leaving it somewhere else; operated by Pipedesk OÜ, Estonia.

## Every page in one file

- [llms-full.txt](https://steps.org/llms-full.txt): every page above, in full, concatenated. Each page is also available on its own at <page-url>.md

## Optional

- [Privacy Policy](https://steps.org/privacy-policy/): GDPR privacy policy — what AI processing exists (asking and saving, nothing more), nothing trains models, nothing is sold, EU storage, delete means delete.
- [Terms of Service](https://steps.org/terms/): The free 30 days and pricing, cancellation, your content, not-therapy disclaimer, liability, governing law (Estonia).

Facts current as of 2026-09-02.