Day One for iOS and Mac (affiliate links) is one of my favorite apps, even though I may not use it every single day. With 2.0’s introduction of support for multiple journals, though, I’ve found a number of new uses for it beyond personal journaling and reflection.
Note: If you need help with the core questions of why and how to journal for yourself, Day One has a pretty good series on its blog.
As for what to do with the new multiple journal support, I’ll share a couple of my own cases and a few ideas below that you can use as inspiration. While other apps may cover some or all of these tasks for you, mixing these with Day One’s other features—attaching locations to entries, automation with IF, multiple photos per entry, plotting entry dates on a scrolling calendar, and more—make it a compelling option for saving and looking back on all sorts of things:
- Social journal – Create a new journal specifically for saving certain kinds of activity on across all your social media accounts (mine is simply called “Social”). With Day One’s new, dedicated channel on IF, you can automatically save things like favorited tweets, Facebook photos you’re tagged in, liked videos on YouTube, Instagram photos, you like, and much more. You can also use Day One’s powerful app extension to cover that last mile of stuff you don’t want to automate. This is one of my favorite uses of Day One’s journals, especially after my previous tool for this, Favs, seems to be abandoned.
- Work journal – Some people don’t like to mix work and personal lives, so this is a good way to separate your journaling and reflection for work purposes.
- #Winning journal – If you’re like me, and sometimes you have a hard time remembering how far you’ve come in terms of personal or professional growth, a journal for cataloging milestones and other wins could go a long way. This could be instead of, or in addition to, a Work journal, but the idea is to set rules or goals for what to catalog here. Things like finishing a big project, receiving a compliment, getting a new client, and overcoming a personal fear or challenge are all good ideas.
- Photo a day – Maybe you want to build and explore your photography habit, or maybe you just need a place to keep your self portrait progression shots somewhere besides your Photos app. A dedicated Day One journal could be great for this, especially if you travel and want to record the location of your shots.
- Quote journal – I like saving quotes, and for a couple years now I’ve used the excellent Quotebook from Lickability. But recently I realized I sometimes post quotes to services like Tumblr, and I wanted an easy way to collect those too. I created a new Day One journal, hooked up a couple recipes in IF (such as “if I post a quote to Tumblr, add it to X journal in Day One”). I like that I can pull in these quotes from other places, in addition to manually adding them, and they’ll sync to all my devices, including my Mac.
Additions:
- Booze journal – Another place where attaching places and locations, as well as tags, can be real handy for cataloging the beer, wine, and spirits you try and enjoy. Thanks Jay Ray.
That’s all I have for now. If you have some Day One journal that might be good fits here, let me know on Facebook and Twitter.
