Most days, I end my work day with a “Daily Log” entry. Sometimes, this is in a notebook, and sometimes I do it digitally, but no matter the format, it ends up in Day One in a journal called “Logs.”
(I am very creative.)
These journal entries are structured in a way to let me quickly capture my day, along with a few thoughts. Here’s the template:
DATE HERE Summary: A few sentences about my day will go here. Or maybe just one sentence. You aren’t the boss of me, jouraling system! Three Completed Tasks:
- A task here.
- A task there.
- …and here, too….
One Bad Thing: Something I found frustrating or disappointing during the day, or something I’m struggling with and want to keep tabs on in the future. One Good Thing: I want to end on a high note, so this is something I found encouraging or exciting during the day.
I have this all bundled up in a TextExpander snippet, but Day One’s oddball formatting (especially for the “Three Completed Tasks” doesn’t always play nice with text being pasted or expanded in place, which I find annoying.
This week, Day One 4.2 for iOS shipped with support for templates. Here’s a bit from the Day One blog:
Templates have been a requested feature by many faithful users and can help users overcome writers block, capture information quickly, track items/routines/changes over time, and help form a consistent journaling habit.
The six built-in templates are all interesting, but the ability to create my own grabbed my attention. In just a few minutes, I rebuilt my Daily Log system within Day One itself:
The template building interface is very simple. You can add formatted text with Day One’s visual editor, and add section headers with just a few taps. As simple as this is, I would like to see more options for inserting information like the date and time, location, weather and other metadata that Day One is already keeping track of on iOS.
For example, I put the date as the title for each of these entries; that is why I have the placeholder “DATE HERE” text in my template. Hopefully, the Day One team will look into these templates becoming a bit smarter in the future.
Another issue is the lack of support for this on the Mac at time of publishing. I assume it’s coming, but when they do, Day One should make sure cross-platform formatting is done correctly. For example, check out the missing bullet points in these screenshot. One is on my iPhone, the other on my iMac Pro:
Update: Day One says this is a known issue and is being worked on.
These issues aside, I’m really liking this new feature. Now, I can tap to add an entry, select my template and fill it in very quickly. When an app I’ve used for years adds a feature that I will use many times a week, I can’t help but be excited.
