a journelly update

introduction to capture

I reviewed Journelly not to long ago on this site. I wanted to share something of an update on how I’ve been using it because I’ve found it to make a wonderful capture system for me.

Capture, to me, is the act of capturing information in the moment so that it’s not lost. There is an inherent challenge with capture as it needs to be as quick and seamless as possible. Any amount of friction increases the chance that the info is lost. If I hear a quote I want to save? I’ve got to immediately have a place to capture it. If I think of an idea? I need an immediate place to capture it. Or maybe a task, large or small, comes to mind - I need someplace to capture that. And it means having a place where I don’t have to wait 45+ seconds for something like Obsidian to open on my phone.

Capture is best suited for the device that’s on you the most. For me that’s my phone. There are apps out there designed for this task (Capture by sir.studio is one such app that works fine it just wasn’t for me) and people use note apps for this as well, like Drafts or Obsidian. I’ve struggled in finding the workflow that works well for me though. Most of what I’ve tried have contained just enough friction to make it not worth the hassle so either make the time to go to the final destination of the info or I just lose it.

enter journelly

What I didn’t expect to find with Journelly was an amazing capture system. Journelly opens fast. I click the app’s icon and it’s immediately open. I click the big blue button at the bottom of the screen and I’m immediately ready to capture info. It’s just a matter of write and save. Write and save. Over and over again as the need to capture arises.

If I’m in a big hurry it’s easy to do short hand and come back to it later - the timeline arrangement with prominent date display makes it easy to find less developed entries. At my leisure I can easily come back and develop the thought and add any appropriate tags. The core of the information was quickly saved with as little friction as possible.

I’ve taken to tagging everything in a way that lets me place it where it should be placed. #thoughts get added to my notebook eventually. #tasks do as well (if I haven’t already checked them all off prior to processing). #ideas go into special ideas buckets based on their context. #quotes get added to my quote library (with any contextual tags of course). Anything else was probably just meant for the Journelly timeline and is comfortable resting there for me to peruse as I remember the days.

first comes capture then comes action

As I said above I tag, and I use some broad “action” oriented tags (action in the sense that they are categories I want to act on). Journelly makes this super easy as it’s just a single doc in your iCloud drive. Because of this I periodically run a script to help me file. Right now that looks like this:

1. I run a script pointed to:

• my journelly file
• a key_tags.txt file that’s just a list of the tags I care about (the four mentioned above)
• where I want the info sent

1. The script scans the journelly file for the key tags and for any entry matching them that doesn’t include the #processed tag it:

• creates a new .md file based on that entry
• strips the weather and location data (I don’t need it for these things)
• adds a #processed tag to the journelly entry in the Journelly file so in the future that entry won’t be turned into a md file

1. The script sends the .md files directly to my silverbullet.md install (which I use for my plaintext/md note database) via scp.

I’ve got a query setup in silverbullet that lists any newly captured entries so that I can rename and file on my own time. Also, because that #processed tag gets added to the Journelly entry I can easily delete any of those entries from within Journelly that I don’t want cluttering my timeline.

My script is in python as it’s a language I’m used to. I suspect there are a lot of different ways and languages you could do to do something similar. Currently I run it manually as I’m still testing things but eventually I’ll have it run automatically so that my touch points are just the initial capture and then the filing in my note database.

looking forward

I’d love to see some sort of archive functionality in Journelly (even if it’s just a tag that gets hidden). Currently you can edit, share or delete posts but some sort of archive functionality would let me hide posts I capture and process but then later review them if the need arose (rather than deleting them as I’m tend to do now). One possible approach could be a separate Journelly archive document that archived posts are moved to (and that’s something I could potentially script in the short term but they wouldn’t show in app as I’d prefer).

Anyways, as I mentioned earlier, I’m finding Journelly to be an amazing capture system - hopefully this gives you some ideas for using it that way too!

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