How to write a letter to your future self

A letter to your future self is a small time capsule. You write down how things are now, what you hope for and what you’re worried about, and you don’t read it again until a date you choose. When it opens, you get something no diary gives you: your own voice from a year ago, talking to you as you are now.

It only works if you can’t peek. That’s why a note in your notes app rarely does the job, and why Shadowkit has a skill just for it: Capsule.

What to write

There’s no wrong way, but a few things make a letter better to open:

Where you are today. Where you live, what your days look like, what’s on your mind this week. The ordinary details are the ones you forget first.
What you hope will be true. “You still walk on Sunday mornings.” “You finally learned to say no.” Specific beats grand.
What you’re unsure about. A decision you’ve just made, a worry you can’t shake. Future you knows how it turned out.
A question. “Did the move feel worth it?” It turns the letter into a conversation.

Write as if to a friend who knows you well. A few paragraphs is plenty.

How long to seal it for

A month or six: for something you’re in the middle of, like a new job, a training plan or a move.
A year: the classic. Long enough for things to change, short enough to remember writing it.
Five years or more: for a birthday that ends in zero, a child’s first year or a wedding. Shadowkit lets you pick any date up to 50 years ahead.

How Capsule works

Tap + on Capsule’s page and write. A letter has an optional title, like “To me at 30”, and up to 10,000 characters, far more than a letter needs. It saves as a draft while you type, so you can come back to it over a few days and change it as much as you want.

When it’s ready, tap Seal… and choose when it opens: 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 5 years, or a date of your own. Then Seal letter.

From then on it’s shut. Its page shows only the title, the day you wrote it and how many days are left: not a word of the letter itself. You can’t edit it or open it early. If you change your mind completely, you can still delete it.

The day it opens

On the morning of the day, at 09:00, you get one notification: “A letter from you is ready”. It doesn’t show the title or any of the words, so it’s safe on a lock screen. You can turn it off when you seal a letter; the letter still waits for you under Ready to open.

Open it and it reads like a letter, under “From you, a year ago”. Afterwards it stays under Opened, to read again whenever you like. At the bottom is Write back to future you, so the next one is a tap away.

On an iPhone, iOS limits how many notifications an app can line up ahead, so Shadowkit keeps the next letter’s notification ready and lines up the one after it when you open the app.

Private, like the rest of Shadowkit

Your letters are kept on your phone, in the profile you wrote them in, and never sent anywhere: the app doesn’t have internet access, and there’s no account to make. A sealed letter doesn’t show up in the app’s search or on Today, Home’s first page, which shows only how many are ready or the days to the next.

The free version holds 3 sealed letters waiting at a time in a profile; drafts and opened letters don’t count. Shadowkit Pro removes the limit. For a few lines about today rather than a letter to later, see what makes a journal app private.