Start journaling today with this simple (and free) Siri Shortcut!

Start regular journaling today! I’ve been journaling daily since 2016 and over the years I’ve tweaked my system. I posted my most advanced version of journaling workflow using Siri Shortcuts and iA Writer over a year ago. However, as I recently prepared a more basic Journaling Shortcut in Polish for my monthly column at the iMagazine, today I’m sharing with you all the English version of the basic Journaling Shortcut. It doesn’t require any additional app. Only Siri Shortcuts which comes with every iOS or macOS now. Just get the shortcut and start journaling today:

Journal Basic with Siri Shortcuts

You can add this Shortcut for free to your Shortcuts library:

Journal Basic

Once you’ve added this Shortcut, open it up and you’ll be guided through the following steps:

• Goals - you’ll see your goals
• Choose your date - default is today
• Choose a journal entry - morning or evening entry
• Answer questions depending on the entry
• Shortcut saves your journal entry in a Markdown file: YEAR.md in your Shortcuts iCloud folder
• That’s it!

Why different entries for morning and evening?

As I wrote in more detail before Morning entry is focused on gratitude. It asks me to write what I’m thankful for that happened the day before, which opportunity and also something small. After that, it asks me the focusing question: what’s the one thing I should do on this day such that everything else is easier or unnecessary. Evening entry is focused on wrapping up the day. It asks me what was awesome today, which sport I practiced and what I could have done better.

Anyway, if you need more in-depth information on the background of me coming up with these two journaling routines, please read my post from 2016 where I explain in detail how I got here.

Get the Journal Basic Siri Shortcut and start journaling today!

Stop procrastinating and start journaling today! Get the Siri Shortcut and add your first entry today and once you’re done, post a tweet with #SiriJournal and tag me - @MSliwinski - happy journaling!

🇵🇱 Alternatively, you can get this journaling Siri Shortcut in Polish: Dziennik. Feel free to translate it to other languages and I’ll update this post!

Version history

• 2.1 - 2022, 25 November - small formatting improvement for goals
• 2.0 - 2022, 30 August - Improvement: every entry can be skipped by leaving it blank, just hit ENTER and it won’t be added to your journal + New feature: Menu option to just open the journal file in your default Markdown editor.
• 1.0 - 2022, 7 July - initial version of the shortcut.