How To Automate Your Journal with Drafts

A quick and simple way to capture everything

I’ve been writing a daily journal for over 2 and a half years, in fact, at the time of writing this story, I’ve written for 984 days.

It’s become a habit to complete an entry every day.

I think it’s important to help keep things straight. From a mental health perspective. It’s something that I have encouraged the kids to do too.

Writing down feelings is a cathartic way to get any ‘bad’ moods and thoughts out of your head. It may not solve the problem, but I do feel that when I look back on the days, I can see how much things have changed.

As well as writing my thoughts, I usually capture what I did that day, which gives me memories for the future.

Day One

I use Day One as the app to capture my thoughts and pictures. I occasionally capture the audio of the moment too; for example, when I’m at the beach, I record a few seconds of the sea. That always brings a smile to my face.

Day One is filled with features to make journalling a fun and rewarding experience.

It’s free to use the basic download, but there are many more features available if you subscribe to the Premium version.

Using Drafts

This story is about automating my journal entries using Drafts.

I’ve written about this app many times. It’s my one place to capture anything, and then I consider where it needs to live.

It’s been billed as the “swiss army knife of text”, and when you take a look at it, you’ll understand why.

Drafts is only available on iOS and MacOS.

I’m not going to talk about all the settings you can make; suffice it to say this is one very versatile app, and you need to play around with it to truly get the idea…

Or read this story that I wrote a while ago ⬇️

When the Drafts app is launched, it opens up very blazingly fast, on a blank page, ready to start writing.

Once I have written my daily thoughts and journal, I have an Action within Drafts that I run, which automatically opens Day One and populates the text.

Creating the Action

This is how to create the Action in Drafts.

First, at the top of the right-hand column, in Drafts, click the ‘+’ button and select ‘New Action’

In the Steps column, click on ‘+’ to open the following dialogue box.

This gives you an idea of the breadth of actions that you can create to automate your notes.

Enter URL in the search bar, and select URL.

When you select this Step, you’ll see the Template box, as below:

This is the URL that you need to enter:

dayone2://post?entry=[[draft]]

There are a couple of small admin things to do, just to clean it up.

On the left-hand side, you can decide what should happen when the Action is run; I set mine to Trash.

On the right-hand side, you can select if you want this Action to be available on iOS and/or MacOS.

I usually have all my Actions available on both, unless not technically possible.

I may tidy it up a little (if I’ve noticed a typo), or I’ll add a piece of media to the entry, and that’s it.

Drafts is ever present in my iPhone dock.

When I say it’s the first place I go to make notes, I really mean that.

It’s great for anything; large documents, quick notes, even an email address.

Actions

I’ve talked through the Action for adding an entry to Day One, but I also have Actions to post to Apple Notes, Obsidian or even Apple Reminders.

I can write a message to send via WhatsApp or iMessage.

How about sending an entry to Mastodon (or ‘X’) and there’s even a ChatGPT action to help write a document.

NB: I did NOT use ChatGPT to help write this story

If you haven’t tried Drafts before, then I highly recommend it.

It’s free to download and use, unless you want to take advantage of the Pro features, in which case, at the time of writing, it’s £17.50 per year.

Have you used Drafts? Do you journal?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Also, please don’t forget to give this story a round of applause…

Thank you for reading

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