Memory Threads & Fragments vol. 1
My personal 'memory stack'
I’m Charles, founder of thragma. In this Substack series I am exploring memory, our relationship with memories in our culture, and sharing updates on our product development at thragma.
I will write weekly on a Thursday in 2026.
I also write a personal Substack series, Espresso & Sparkling Water, where I share my reflections on the founder journey and my life as I build thragma. This is published weekly on a Tuesday!
My 2026 ‘resolutions’ came in the form of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). I made this shift a couple of years ago and this format has proved so much more effective in building habits and systems that generate the changes that I want to make in my life. The OKR format, however, is clearly a sign that I’m still a recovering Chief of Staff!
This year many of the key results are focussed on building habits associated with memory and reflection. I thought I would share my personal memory stack for 2026 as I try to learn as much as possible about how we interact with our memories, both profound and mundane.
Regular Habits
I am maintaining various regular habits to make me more conscious of my memory-making as well as the mediums that my memories can be relived through.
Daily handwritten journal: I write one page of A5 every day, at the end of each day, which helps me frame my experience. Often these are more reflective of my mindset rather than providing a record of what I did each day. Reviewing these journals from 2025 was fascinating.
Daily Roam Research memo: I’ve started recording one song, one photo, and one conversation per day in Roam. I have a Spotify link, a photo, and a specific page for each individual that I list as my highlighted conversation for that day as well as my notes on the context for each selection. Over the year, this will give me a playlist for my year, a photo journal, and a contextualised list of the people who have engaged with me in a meaningful way.
Weekly Photo & Voice Note share to WhatsApp: every Sunday, I send one photo from the week to myself on WhatsApp and then record a Voice Note with why it holds some kind of memory for me. This echoes the frequency and user flow that I am trying to build in the future thragma product.
Repositories for my memories
These habits, some of which I have been maintaining for over a year already, have helped me understand the value of the mundane and the importance of the everyday in building my memory stores for the future.
One of my professors, with whom I am currently working on a research project, was involved in some fascinating research on the rediscovery of memories. In short, we are awful at forecasting the future value we will place on memories, and we ascribe much more value than we would expect to the normal moments compared to the milestone ones. We therefore aren’t great at capturing them, and I hope thragma will help with that.
As it stands my memories reside across my camera rolls in iPhotos and Google Photos, handwritten notebooks, voice notes to myself on WhatsApp, my Substacks, Spotify playlists, and various documents in my Google Drive. There is nothing inherently wrong with fragmentation of this kind, but I think that we need a new medium that I call ‘living memory cards’ that will provide a private, but shareable infrastructure layer for our memories.
These ‘living memory cards’ will contain a photo, voice-note context, and a musical track, if relevant, as well as all the necessary meta data to make them easily searchable at a later date.
I’m intrigued as to whether my perspective on the memories that I think are important, interesting, or simply worth recording change as I review them over the year to come.
If anything in this post has intrigued you please subscribe to this Substack, sign-up for thragma’s waitlist here, and explore whether you could participate in our research project on the relationship between memories and personality here.