✱ Journal feature

tvillemw

For 35 years I have kept a digital diary, first on Mac and now on iPad/iPhone. My diary grew out of a UNIX system I developed in the 1980s for reporting programming progress to my supervisors. I keep files with lines beginning in YYYY/MM/DD for sorting and searching. As of today I have 24,390 entries!

Originally I used HyperCard and AppleScript; I made an On This Day script that assembled entries from 1, 5, and 10 years prior and emailed it to me and my husband. Now I use Notes for making daily entries on iPad which I process every month on Mac using BBEdit and AppleScript, the output of which I upload to the cloud for searching on IPad/iPhone using CSV Touch. A cumbersome process. CSV Touch is great for searching, you get instantaneous response and the app spits out just the applicable lines. Although I love CSV Touch, it's not good at sharing data with other apps and I fear the author will someday abandon it.

So, the more I think about it the more I'd like to split the 24,390 lines into 366 day notes.

Matthias

Wow, 35 years of digital journaling is impressive—your dedication to evolving your system is truly inspiring! I hope Forever ✱ Notes will be the last system you’ll have to use 👍

tvillemw

I don't know how much time I have left LOL but I'll keep adding entries as long as I can! I also track expenses in a similar fashion.

The iPad is my preferred computer. I use my 2016 MacBook only once a month (for the awkward processing described above), I don't want to upgrade it. I still prefer CSV Touch for searching. So, there are still some things to work out.

shokk

Maybe this will be of interest to you! Here is someone who loaded 10 years of files into Chat-GPT for analysis. https://every.to/chain-of-thought/can-gpt-3-explain-my-past-and-tell-me-my-future

tvillemw

shokk What fun, thanks! ….adding beach in Thailand to my bucket list

PerDiem

I am in a similar situation with years of notes, broken out into individual days. I love the concept of one note per day. I have actually just finished the process of merging my notes using shortcuts. I'm not sure if my specific process will work for your setup, but it may give you some ideas.

I created folders for each day. It was tedious, but I figured my first step was to see my notes grouped by day. My format was "01 01", "01 02", etc.
Using shortcuts, I searched within my notes archive folder for the date in the title. For me, I could search for -01-01 or -01-02, etc. Next step was to move the notes into my daily folders.
The final step is to append each note into the Forever Note for that day. The shortcut looks into the day folder and appends the body of each note into the daily note:

Yes, it's still a mostly manual process, but I also wanted to control it. I will be knocking the tasks every month and I figure by the end of the year, I'll be very, very organized!