Forever ✱ Journal | A Shortcut Suite that makes it easier to a create a Journal

kavia

Hi there, I'm Kavia.

I've recently switched to Forever ✱ Notes after taking the plunge and tidying up my Digital Garden. My personal experience with it has been that it's a vastly helped me with falling victim to Shiny Object Syndrome, by helping us use the tools we already have (which work very well).

I'd like to help improve this system a bit.

Firstly, I'd like to thank Matthias for creating such a simple and neat framework that's saved people like me from heading towards more complex platforms like Notion and Obsidian (which are also fantastic but can include more features than are needed).

I’ve put together an alternative framework for the journal in Forever ✱ Notes for those of us who don’t want to add the links individually, inside every single note. The original idea is amazing, and having a fixed number of 383 notes keeps everything clean and tidy.

This framework utilises Apple Shortcuts to mitigate the mundane and repetitive process of linking individual notes. I've noticed it put many people off at first (including myself) to adapting to this system, so hopefully this will help simplify things.
I've given it a test on my end, and everything seems to be working fine. I've also included some suggestions for future improvements (I don't have time at the moment).
If you want to try it out, it creates a new folder for all of the notes to go into so it doesn't mess up your current setup: that folder is called '✱ Journal' (apt) and you can use it as a sandbox for testing this system, separate to your other notes.

Please scroll down to see the links to download these Apple Shortcuts!

Overview

Now, all you need to do is link to the ✱ Home note in every note, nothing else. This usually takes 10-15 mins in one sitting.

Included is a modified version of the Journal Creation Shortcut by Matthias. I suggest you change your New Notes in Settings to ‘Always Start with Title’ for this stage so that new notes are setup properly. You can always change it back to whatever you had before (if you’re like me and have it set to ‘Body’ by default).

Few things:

This version uses a dedicated folder named ✱ Journal
- The purpose of this folder is to keep things tidy and separate it from the other notes
- The shortcut only looks for notes inside here, to speed things up (fixed number of notes)
Shortcut links with smart linking are used instead of linking to actual notes
This leaves a minimalist appearance for each journal note
You can always go back to ✱ Home and then use the menu below to get to a note without leaving the Notes app; the functionality is pretty much the same

You might get temporarily taken out of the Notes app and into the Shortcuts window while it runs, but you’ll quickly be taken back to Notes in the one you wanted. You can always go back by selecting ‘Recent Notes’ and finding it in the menu.

Future improvements

Auto select the current Month/Quarter/whatever in the list as a suggestion
- If anyone knows how to do this, please let me know
Auto create list with ✱ Home link already included and working in each element
- Instead of a link back to the ✱ Home note, it opens a URL scheme to open it
- URL schemes can be embedded in notes created by a shortcut, so no manual linking needed

This relies on a new Go ✱ Home shortcut so when you click it, it opens ✱ Home

Content

What do you get?

Shortcut suite

See image

Minimalist notes

Every single note will now only have ✱ Home under its title. You only need to link back to one note. This reduces the complexity of linking stuff to be an O(n) process.

The Journal section of the ✱ Home now looks like this:

See image

✱ Month

When you click on Months it will take you to this menu, and you can select the month note.

See image

✱ Quarter

The same goes for picking a quarter i.e. pressing Quarters

See image

✱ Pick Day

When you want to navigate to a specific day, just select the day from the calendar view. The year doesn't really matter because it's included in every daily note (as per 383 Forever ✱ Notes journal framework)

On iOS:

See image

On MacOS, there’s an extra step to see the native calendar preview for selecting your note. It’s not as nice as on iOS, but hopefully Apple will update this in the future:

See image

URL schemes

Copy and paste these into your home note. You could use a Markdown to RTF converter for convenience (I’ve included one in the pack); as long as you have the shortcuts installed on your device and you haven’t changed the names for them, you’ll have no issues. I’ve made sure to title them with ‘✱’ for easy recognition, in line with the Forever ✱ Notes framework. This also frees up names for other shortcuts.

Steps to use

Copy the below code
Run the “Make RTF from MD” shortcut
Paste into your ✱ Home note
Format as you require

[Today](shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=%E2%9C%B1%20Today) • [Years](shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=%E2%9C%B1%20Years)
[Quarters](shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=%E2%9C%B1%20Quarter) • [Months](shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=%E2%9C%B1%20Months)
[Go to Day](shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=%E2%9C%B1%20Pick%20Day)

The Make RTF from MD shortcut is included.

See image

Links

I've tried to embed images into this post but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be working, my apologies.

Here's a PDF guide if you are having trouble viewing the images.

tr4jan

Cheers for the effort and sharing. I'm a mite biased -with the best intend.

Imho the F*N approach promotes the "shiny object syndrome" in the same way as everything else. A place to gather, stockpile and (oftenly) overorganize data.

The title of your post refers to "easier", which I don't find to be the case when reading it. From a perspective of a Joe User / Jane User, I don't see simplification, as the kinda complexity persists. Long text instruction, plenty of link adjustments, touching code… Don´t get me wrong, this is not a criticism of your effort, but rather a spotlight on the fact that simplification of procedural steps do not ease up the complexity of the procedure itself. True simplification would be a plug-and-play state, which, to my knowledge, is not feasible at present.

CatarinaDK

tr4jan

I felt the same way, and I had to read the post several times before I understood everything (English is not my native language). In contrast, Matthias’ approach was easy, simple, and straightforward to implement – at least for me.

JasonTucker

Kavia, thank you for making this. It greatly improves the usability of Forever ✱ Notes for me. I expanded on Forever✱Notes as well by doing some morning routine stuff to add more metadata to my journal entries Enhancing Memory with Automation: My Journey with Forever ✱ Notes and iOS Shortcuts my memory sucks so having any more info I can add to provide content to my day makes for a much better journal entry.

I alway wanted a better home button on each day entry and I'm glad you built this, it makes it much cleaner and easier to navigate.

For those of you doing the ✱ Home prep yourself doing so on a mac is so much faster. My flow was to open the notes click on the left notes column (middle column if you ahve the folder view open) and press Option and Down which will drop you to the bottom. From there paste in the ✱ Home link and click the left or middle column and press Option and Down again, now you don't have to scroll.