Daily journal navigation link issue

ballchi

Hi Matthias,

Thank you for providing the automated shortcut for creating daily journal notes for all 365 days. That was fantastic!

I noticed that the top of each note includes the following text:

✱ Home | Month | Today | ← Back • Next →

However, these are just plain text instead of actual links to the corresponding notes. Is there a way to fix this? Or will I need to manually add the links to each note?

Please advise. Thanks!

Matthias

ballchi Unfortunately Apple Shortcuts doesn't support automatic linking of notes. So yes, the links have to be connected manually. The good news is, that it doesn't take too much time if you do it day by day. Literally a minute or so.

Kerim

This is my biggest problem as well: manually linking each link in all journals as there are thousands of them. I wish there were an easier way to do this, as it takes me forever.

I guess the best approach is to link only the note for the current day (e.g., only link "✱ Home | Month | Today | ← Back • Next →") and then link each day in the month at the start of each month. I really wish there were an easier way, though, let me know if you have any tips for this guys, thanks!

dcx

Rather than progressively add these links I found dedicating 1-1.5 hours to do them all in a batch was highly efficient. Got into a good flow with some music in background.

@Matthias if I'm not mistaken your shortcut did not include Feb 29th, was that intentional?

BruceK

I have a related issue with linking the “<-Back” and “Next->” to SOME single digit month notes. When I do an “add link” and start entering the calendar file, ie: “2 November”, Note application doesn’t find that in my library on the suggested list! So a link cannot be created because the notes app does not see a note named “2 November” (or 1 November, and others.)

Tried recreating the note manually but did not work.

Very weird.

All of my files were created with the Forever Notes Shortcut.

bulletnerd

BruceK I had the same problem, partially because my earlier Apple Notes used a lot of single digit numbers in the title for sorting purposes. The only thing that reliably worked for me was to rename the single digit daily notes from “1 December” to “01 December”. Of course, that’s 9 notes per month x 12 months. I sorted my Notes folder by date created which put all the daily notes together and just hunkered down and renamed them. On my Mac it took less than a half hour. It’s best to do this before linking from the monthly notes to daily notes. @Matthias would it be possible to adjust the note-creating shortcut to use the two-digit format for the first nine days of each month? That would eliminate this linking issue. Thanks!

shokk

I do this monthly in one shot, and it's easier to do on a Mac where you can double-click a word and hit Shift-Command-K for links and type out some of the month to filter the potential notes to link easier. After the first year of that, after having only touched it 12 times, I never have to do it again.

Handling links in Apple Notes is not easy with shortcuts.

Hermitcrabb

I do it a week at a time when I get to Monday. Using Keystrokes, it's pretty fast.

Highlight Home, Command-K, double tap the asterisk. Usually Home appears on the drop-down. A couple down arrows selects it. Return finalizes it. I do the same for each of the other links. It takes about 30 seconds to link them all for that day. Then I select Next and do the same thing for the next day. It's the task of about three minutes or less to complete the links for the next week to ten days.

CrimsonCrow

What Hermitcrabb said.

Plunking away it only took me a few days of a few minutes a day to link everything. Using a laptop I found it quite easy with the keyboard combo: ⌘ K

Ipadnotetaker

Another tip to minimize redundancy is copying hyperlinked text as it’ll retain its respective links when pasted.

For example when you’re linking months under each quarterly section (e.g., Jan, Feb, Mar) you can copy these (once linked) to say the Home note where the same links are required. Hope that helps!

Sethjk

I’m finding myself doing mostly a month at a time, though the daily back/next links I do each day.