Mac Power Users 478: Journaling with Day One

Greetings all,

I have yet to listen to this Podcast of discussion but I wanted to share how I am using the Day One app. I have never been an avid journal writer but when I do I thoroughly enjoy reading older posts.

After listening to a MPU episode where a guest had expressed his love of the Day One app and it’s features I started journaling more often; I already had the app. But, that practice became sporadic.

At this point in time, I use the app all the time. I started taking advantage of multiple journals. One of my headings is “ramblings of a girl on a permanent vacation”. I use this journal when I am feeling a bit philosophical. I started another listing when I lost a dear friend and needed to express that sorrow; writing down those thoughts helped me immensely.

Now, what brings me to the app daily is that I use it for my studies. I discovered it was useful for taking notes in my Spanish class. One journal contains cheat sheets so I have quick access to particular notes when needed. I also have a heading for questions so as I study I deposit my inquiries into that journal.

Often, while on a lunch date, I will whip out the phone and take quick photo within the Day One app; a picture tells it all. I am grandfathered into the cheaper subscription and definitely get my money’s worth. I really don’t worry about losing data and it syncs well between devices.

You might say, that I do love this app.

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You win @colleenjuri. You win.

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Perhaps because I’ve been dabbling in Day Once since, um, day one, I’ve got an account that seems to have broken in two and neither can see the other.

All of my automation is feeding into an account that I can only see in summary form on https://dayone.me/user/dashboard. On that one, I have 1513 entries.

On my “real” account, I have 311 entries.

Is there any way to properly merge these? The one I see on https://dayone.me/user/dashboard does not appear to be able to be manipulated in any way.

Thanks!

We talked about it a little bit on the recent episode, but I didn’t know David had just covered it for MPU at the time :blush:

I reckon this would be one for the JSON export. Log into your automation feeding account and export the 1513 entries to JSON. Then log into your real account and import that file.

I tried to do that earlier, but there was no export from the automation account. So I exported the JSON from the “real” account instead to save the state. I was willing to lose the automated entries but not the actual entries.

Then I just started trying different things. Eventually, what worked was logging into all accounts with my AppleID, not my email address as I had been.

I have an open ticket with Day One (who are probably wondering why there’s a spike in interest suddenly) about whether I can change the login now that I’ve got things stabilized.

It seems that the core issue inside of Day One is that I have two Day One IDs, both just a few digits apart. Not sure how that happened. I’ll update this thread if there is any information from Day One that’s useful to the wider group.

Another great episode. Thank you!

Just wanted to add that I recently imported my entire Foursquare/Swarm history into Day One. And after listening to this episode, I decided to share it online, so here’s the link to my blog post about it, which also has the Python script I used for the process.

https://samgrover.com/2019/04/16/importing-foursquareswarm-history.html

It’s worth mentioning OneNote as an alternative here. It’s free, although improved if you have an Office subscription, cross platform, supports multiple notebooks and has drawing and writing capability, unlimited length pages and you can post pictures into it. I use it daily at work in much the same way as David describes using DayOne.

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@MitchWagner I drive a limo, I was taking a client to the airport about an hour ride. The whole time he was texting on his iPhone but using the dictation feature on the keyboard. Like you said about about clear sentences, this guy was speaking in very clearly sentences but was speaking at a normal rate just very clear. I keep thinking to myself how the hell is this guy so good at it. I really gotta practice using it cause it seemed so cool.

Can’t wait to read what @MacSparky writes about dictation.

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Driving and Crying Journaling

I would like to journal, but don’t make time for it. I spend 1.5 to 2 hours in mindless traffic everyday.
Could dictating to DayOne be a solution to this problem?
Thoughts:

  • Scream at phone running GPS on dash
  • Awkwardly talk to arm with Apple Watch
  • Buy AirPods (use one)

Appreciate your thoughts!

Did you get a peak at what software he used?

It was just Siri in the text message keyboard nothing special. But he spoke clearly and must have been doing it for awhile it was very clear. I mean he also could’ve been editing it after he said stuff, I couldn’t see what he was doing but I did see him just using the normal texting messages keyboard.

I LOLed at your subject line.

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I am intrigued with the pen and paper and putting images into Day One.

I have been keeping my professional journal in Day One stor a few years and I like it, but I have one little thing that annoys me.

I keep a running Journal entry in Drafts, and use textexpander snippets for a lot of repetitive entry, including the header, with contains the date of the note. I usually start each day by filing yesterdays note to Day One and then start a new one in drafts.

That means that pretty much every day I have to go in and edit the date on the note in Day One to yesterdays date, a date that is already available on the first line of the note, and probably in the metadata for the drafts note as well. Since Day One supports changing the date on notes with images fairly easily it doesn’t seem far off to get it to automatically detect the date in a note from drafts. I just can’t figure out a way to do so on iOS.

Any suggestions from any avid drafts and Day One users out there?

Enjoyed the episode-- heard it briefly mentioned about lack of video uploading on Day One-- which has been my biggest complaint about Day One over what my wife and I previously used, Momento. I was having to buy bigger and bigger phones just for my wife’s 40GB(!) journal on Momento, but she loved it, loved that it had video support, and I liked that I could see her entries about the kids with pics and videos-- BUT I hated that I couldn’t sync specific journals or keep everything in the cloud instead of locally.
Maybe Momento has changed now, but the thing that has held me back from proclaiming my love for Day One from the mountaintops (or at least from twitter…) has been the lack of video support. Everything else is beautiful. Has anyone heard when video support might be coming?

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It looks like the link to Stephen’s PDF is not working currently. Curious if anyone has it to re-link?

Stephen’s “Daily Log” PDF Form

For whatever it’s worth: DayOne handles YouTube embeds just fine. So it may be worth checking whether it can handle embeds from a private YouTube channel (I was embedding a video from someone else’s public channel, so I’m not sure whether it can handle private videos).

Blerg. Here you go: http://512pixels.net/downloads/Daily%20Log%20Form.pdf

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I agree no need to be apologetic for who you are and honestly meditation mindfulness being woke/conscious etc is all pretty popular these days in society. I enjoy seeing tech people who practice those things and don’t hide it share how you integrate such into your busy lives - especially amongst this online lifestyle we all lead