Tag: Day One

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“I may not be as strong as I think,” the old man said. “But I know many tricks and I have resolution.” 

– The Old Man and the Sea, E. Hemingway.

 

At baseline, my memory is only so-so.

For example, I can remember chord progressions to songs and lyrics only with a lot of rehearsal. I need cheat sheets for a lot of stuff in my day to day life. My autobiographical memory —my memory of past events — is especially not so good.

Vonnegut said we’re all just “huge, rubbery test tubes with chemical reactions seething inside.” Well, my chemical reactions are such that my brain doesn’t encode very well the things that have happened to me. Or, if it does encode them, I can’t recall them very easily. Either way, it’s the way I’m built.

Fortunately, I’ve got some good compensatory skills. I’ve found a bunch of tools to help support my memory in ways that are good and beneficial.

I am a master todo list maker and checklist reviewer and routine-doer. Siri has been one of the greatest things to ever happen for people like me. A half-dozen times a day or more I ask my watch to remind me about something I need to do. I am being supported at any point in time by a constellation of technologies that not only helps me compensate for my dodgy autobiographical memory but may in fact allow me to flourish in a way that I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to compensate.

There are a host of possible explanations for why memory —and specifically autobiographical memory—is weaker in some people. Hormone/thyroid disregulation can cause encoding issues. Mood disorders. The way we are socialized (the nurture part of nature v. nurture).

After years of trying to figure out what is going on, I’ve settled instead on trying to figure out what I can do to improve my autobiographical memory.

One of the best things I’ve done is to keep a journal. I use an app called Day One. I write down all sorts of stuff in there like when our mattress got delivered or when I get a cold or when I taught my son how to play a G-run on guitar.

How Journaling Helps with Memory

There are, I’ve determined, two primary ways that I can improve upon my baseline autobiographical memory and journaling supports both of them: Noting and Rehearsing.

Noting

1.) By recollecting with as much precision as possible certain event: what I saw, what I remember and writing that down in my journal. I have many days in my journal where the entry is simply a list of three specific things that I remembered seeing from the previous day.

But the point here is, especially for positive events or accomplishments, to pause and take a beat and note how the positive event felt and the physical details surrounding that event.

Our brains are wired to hold on to negative stuff and let the positive stuff fall away. By noting with detail the positive stuff it sort of coaxes the brain to hold on to the memory a bit better.

So whenever possible, when something positive happens, when I wrap up some minor or major accomplishment, I try to note the details down in my journal.

Rehearsing

2.) By regularly rehearsing and revisiting past events. This is the social component of autobiographical memory. We all know friends and family members who like to tell stories about the past. Those people have good autobiographical memories but, importantly, because they have a bias towards retelling those stories, they are constantly improving their autobiographical memory.

It can be a vicous or virtuous cycle. If you have good autobiographical memory and like to tell stories about things that have happened to you, that muscle will keep getting stronger. If you don’t have a great autobiographical memory to begin with, you won’t tell a whole lot of stories, won’t revisit your memories and the muscle will continue to atrophy.

So, I have a strongly ingrained habit of not only writing in my journal but also reviewing my journal. Day One’s “on this day” feature is especially great as it will show entries from this date from prior years in my journal and it’s valuable and helpful to revisit those entries as, I hope, through revisiting them I’m making stronger connections in my brain.

Slippery Quarantine Time

Over quarantine, I’ve noticed a different kind of slipperiness to my memory: I am having a difficult time gauging the passing of time. I know I’m not alone in this. Days feel like weeks but whole seasons feel like they go by in a week, too.

Time feels like it is passing both slowly and quickly. It is disorienting, like looking out the window of a speeding train when another speeding train appears alongside and it all of a sudden feels like you are going both fast and slow.

Day One’s handy “On this day..” feature is useful here but knowing what I was up to last year on this day (or 5 years ago, etc.) is not helping to orient me in time. But I have found another practice using Day One that has helped orient me a bit more precisely in time.

Over the past few weeks is now to revisit in my journal not only the entries from “on this day” over the past few years but to also look at:

  • on this day last week
  • on this date last month
  • on this date six months ago

It’s by reviewing this breadcrumb of events at different time scales that I am slowly starting to regain a sense of the passing of time. Sometimes the events referenced in my entry from last week feel like they happened yesterday, othertimes those events feel like distant memories. Either way, reviewing the entries with this cadence feels helpful.

Screenshot 2022 01 31 at 3 25 02 PM

It’s not making time feel less slippery but it is does help me get out of the whiplash feeling that time has left a lot of people feeling during quarantine.

With the help of another Day One forum member, I’ve got a pretty useful iOS shortcut put together that you can run to view events with this cadence [download here]. I hope you find it helpful! If you do, I’d love it if you drop me a line and let me know how you’re using it. Note that while we wait for the developers at Day One to update the Mac app to work with shortcuts, this shortcut only works on iOS devices at the moment.

 

 

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One of the most popular Shortcuts I’ve written is my “Logging to Day One” shortcut that allows you to keep a timestamped list of items to a single day’s journal entry throughout the day. I wrote a post about it two years ago, you can read more about it here.

I updated the post today and it got me thinking about how, two years ago when I first wrote that shortcut, how amazing it would be if that same shortcut would run on my Mac so that I didn’t need to maintain a Keyboard Maestro version as well. 

UntitledImage

Well, Monterey is here and Shortcuts are on the Mac but the shortcut doesn’t work. I get an error indicating that the folks at Day One need to make some changes to the app yet to support Shortcuts on the Mac version of Day One. Hopefully that will be coming soon. 

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Highlighting the truly first-world problem of Mac automation being totally different from iOS automation, I wrote up a simple AppleScript that mirrors the functionality of my iOS shortcut that takes my brain dump list out of Day One and “intelligently” transfers it to Things.

When I write my morning entry in my Day One journal I sometimes brainstorm a little todo list, and this allows me to copy it and load the todo list into Things. Moreover, it looks for the string “today” in the brain dump and puts those items in the Today list in things.

set TodayStr to "today"
set Total to 0
set listContents to get the clipboard
set delimitedList to paragraphs of listContents


tell application "Things3"
	repeat with currentTodo in delimitedList
		if currentTodo as string is not equal to "" then
			set Total to Total + 1
			if currentTodo contains TodayStr then
				set newToDo to make new to do ¬
					with properties {name:currentTodo, due date:current date} ¬
					at beginning of list "Today"
							else
				set newToDo to make new to do ¬
					with properties {name:currentTodo} ¬
												end if
		end if
			end repeat
		end tell

set theDialogText to "Added " & Total & " Todo Items to Things"
display dialog theDialogText

I mapped this in Alfred to ⌘T so that when I’m in Day One and finish brainstorming what I need to tackle, I can just highlight the list and hit ⌘T and the list is moved to Things. Not brain surgery but really useful for me.

Still though it does feel weird to have to automate using AppleScript on the Mac and Shortcuts on iOS.

Especially now that the automating functionality offered by apps like Day One differs depending on whether you are on a Mac or on iOS. Looking at you Append function that’s available on iOS.

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Back in the spring I wrote an automator action that incorporated some Python code to take a downloaded Amazon Order History file and massage it into a nice Markdown table and creates a Day One entry.

A few months back though the Day One command line tool stopped working and that broke this action. But surprise!!! The command line tool works again (although not as well as it used to). So I modified the automator action to get it working again. 

So, pop this workflow in your ~/Library/Services folder and you can just right click on the downloaded Amazon order history file to create a Day One entry from the purchases. 

Screen Shot 2020 01 08 at 7 59 24 AM

 

This is what the Markdown table looks like as a Day One entry (atypically expensive month, FWIW 🙂

Screen Shot 2020 01 08 at 8 02 20 AM

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I use Day One as a journal almost every day. Most mornings start with me doing a bit of a brain dump into Day One, listing anything that’s on my radar that I need to deal with.

So I wrote a shortcut to help me deal with those brain dumps a bit better.

This shortcut:

– takes a list of items from the clipboard (so, I would just select/copy the list in Day One) and creates entries in Things (my todo list app of choice for the past many years).

– With a bit of a rub: if the tasks contains the word “today” (e.g. I need to call Joe today) the shortcut puts the task in the Today section of Things instead of in the Inbox section.

Admittedly this is not really wizardry level stuff here and the inability to run a similar procedure on my Mac (shortcuts only working on iOS I mean) limits its use a bit. But anyway, for anyone running Day One on iOS who is interested, here’s the shortcut I use to extract a brain dump from Day One and load the tasks into Things.

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The other day I posted about using Keyboard Maestro to automate the process of getting my monthly Amazon Order history into a Day One Journal entry. That was the first step of the automation of this task.

This has been a bit more challenging to automate than I was first thinking. I’m working towards this 3 step process:

  • Step 1: open up Day One and in Safari open up the URL for Amazon Order History report screen. [Done]
  • Step 2: automatically download this month’s Amazon Order History report [Need to figure this out]
  • Step 3: create a journal entry from a downloaded Amazon Order History .csv file [Now Done]

I am still messing around with Keyboard Maestro for step 2 but was able to hack together a pretty handy Automator workflow for step 3. It’s a python + BASH script that

  • takes a .csv file, strips out the unnecessary columns,
  • totals up the amount spent for the month
  • create a Markdown table of the important columns from the .csv
  • creates a Day One Journal entry and tags it “Money”

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