How and why I’ve been journaling daily since 2016 in a digital way using Siri Shortcuts (previously Workflows) and some additional apps. There are countless benefits to daily journaling - it clears your thoughts, gives you perspective and helps you find focus. In these posts I share my journey as I’m fine-tunning my journaling app based on Apple’s Siri Shortcuts. Get latest Journal Shortcut!
I like journaling daily. I like planning my next day in the evening. I like tracking how my day is going and what I spend my time on. Yes, I care about all these things and to make sure I do them consistently I prepared a Siri Shortcut (iOS only, sorry!) that helps me do just that! I hope you’ll also find it useful:
I’ve been keeping a semi-regular journal for the past few years and every now and then I’m tweaking the way I approach it. In 2016 I posted why it’s important for me to journal regularly and who inspired me to do that. In 2018 I posted my updated workflows for journaling and planning the day with additional apps I was using - Ulysses, Bear, etc. Later I introduced the concept of intermittent journaling with updated workflows. For 2020 and iOS13 I decided to review and simplify all of this and now I write both my journal and daily planning in Bear app using only three Shortcuts in iOS - here are the details:
I love journaling. I’ve blogged about it in the past and the same rules basically apply today. I’ve also been more conscious about planning my days and I’ve also blogged about my workflows for it in the past. Today I’ll be joining both concepts together, with my up-to-date workflows (Siri shortcuts) and a new concept I’ve been trying lately - intermittent journaling. Here goes:
Keystone habits are critical to a happy and productive life. We’ve been discussing this with my co-host on The Podcast for a while now. To build regular habits and to just reduce some barriers of entry I’m using an iOS app called “Workflow” and have created many workflows that help me get stuff one quicker. These are like recipes for a “digital cake” - my way of doing things quicker. Below I’m sharing a few of these and hope they’ll be useful for you, too. Feel free to copy them and adopt to your needs :-)
I’ve read countless times on the positive aspects of daily journaling. People I admire like Michael Hyatt (author: Living Forward), Tim Ferriss (author: Four Hour Workweek) or Greg McKeown (author: Essentialism) are all keeping a daily journal. Studies show that journaling is really good for you as it gives you a moment of reflection, helps you maintain perspective and organize your thoughts - all are the things we need in this increasingly busy and distraction-prone world. The problem is, it’s easier said than done. I’ve tried journaling many times in the past and always failed, but now finally I’m doing it constantly and I’m really enjoying it. In this lengthy post I want to share how I managed to do it and hopefully give you a shortcut and motivate you to start journaling today!
