A while back I subscribed to Day One. One of the use cases was to have a record of what I did each day (for looking back on what I did and when I did it, where my day went, creating an alibi, etc.). I wanted to use something like Zapier, Automator, Shortcuts, etc, and have certain events in other apps trigger an entry in Day One. Basically, have Day One aggregate all of my activities into a daily log.
Has anyone succeeded in doing this? If so, how was it done? If someone hasn’t done it, but knows how, please let me know! Thanks!
Day One has recently added features they are calling the reimagination of Activity Feed. @LawyerSteve take a look at the new feature set to handle some of your requirements
This is the same project for me but using other software. I started out experimenting with apps similar to Day One, Journey, and then later Diarly (because they were included with my Setapp subscription) but for reasons I hardly remember (I should have logged them) I moved on. For a long time, I used simple text journaling with Ulysses (combined with Nvalt) and that worked okay. Then I became intrigued with Aeon Timeline and have been using that for the past eight months. I love the concept of the visual timeline, the tagging, the complexity it allows, but decided to give that a break and try Devonthink. Since Devonthink is one of my main apps that’s open anyway, I’m testing whether I can do the same thing (without the visuals) and then I won’t have yet another app running in the background. Also, I’m hoping I can speed up my workflow. The goal at this point is to be able to toss short notes into the one file folder (or timeline) with the right tags, markings, timestamps and do it with as little friction as possible.
Day One seems to be your best option, although it doesn’t do everything you want, nor is it particularly configurable. But it’s becoming more so: in their latest podcast episode the CEO described recent changes to the Activity Feed like IDing ‘home’ and ‘work’ via a geofence map, among other things.
I just completed an 1,146-day streak using Day One, timestamps my entries, keeps track of weather, location, imports Instagram posts, etc.
But Zapier doesn’t integrate with Day One, and IFTTT has limited options.
When Gramps would see a guy on the highway weaving all over the road he’d stick his head out the car window and yell, “Pick a lane, lady!”
Wow that’s an impressive streak. I was turned off by subscription for day one but when I looked at pricing, it actually seems reasonable.
I started out using Simplenote because it was text only, and it was a single use so that I wouldn’t deviate. The only difficulty was that as I refined my daily timeline of things, that I wanted to capture and see a trend so I moved to excel. I have subsequently moved back to Simplenote for the habit and the pure simplicity of it all.
Does Day one have ways to view trends or patterns?
My ultimate would be to have a dashboard that tracks health markers, habits (daily intention, gratitude, meditation), and diary notes.
That would add tremendous complexity to the app and it will never offer as good a tracking experience as an app dedicated to habit-tracking. Besides, Day One data is not by default set to encrypt files (and it’s not available in the free version) so there is the real potential of leaking very personal medical and location data that no company wants to be involved with.
Just get a habit tracker app for a couple of bucks and use it.
As for journaling, if you don’t need to know the weather or have an ‘On This Day’ button, or need to automatically pull in your Instagram feed (or Twitter or RSS if you use IFTTT) then you don’t need Day One either. MacJournal is free, NotePlan’s calendar focus is also ideal for journaling, even though it was designed for task management, and there’s always the free tiers of the major journaling apps.
