Matthew Lang

This week I’ve started migrating my Day One entries to Bear. I initially wanted to omit all the tags for my Day One entries on the import, but I decided to leave them in. The reason for this is that although Bear uses these tags and will populate the sidebar with them, it will be much easier for me to migrate entries for each tag into Bear correctly.

I’m using a top-level tag of #journal for all my entries. Within this top-level tag, there will be some nested tags.

• Entries are tagged with the month and year. All tags in June of 2017 will have the tag #journal/2017/06.
• Special moments get their tag of #journal/moments.
• Other tags will be used as #journal/drew and #journal/ethan.

With all the extra Day One tags now listed in my sidebar, I’ve now started the task of migrating these entries to use my new tagging system for my journal entries. I’m taking it a couple of tags at a time, and I’m already roughly a quarter of the way to migrating all these entries over.

It looks like a particular way of tagging these entries, but in the long run, it will be much easier to find everything as well as exporting a month or even a year of entries to another format so that I reproduce them in a better form.

For the last few years, I’ve been using Day One as a digital journal. However, over the previous few months, I’ve been using it less and less. To the point really where I want to stop using it altogether.

Too much meta

The thing about Day One is that while it is a great journaling app, I’ve noticed that I am becoming more and more distracted with the meta-data for each post. Weather, tags, location, starred. It’s all just a little bit too much.

All I want to do write an entry, attach a picture or two and then move on. Day One does let you do this but it’s the meta-data that I find to be too distracting.

The alternatives

Bear is a great note-taking app. I love it.

I use it for many different things, but the one thing that I would like to do is use it more as a digital journal.

I’ve tried to do this before however, I ended up importing all of Day One’s tags when I did this, so I ended up with more tags than I needed. This time I hope to opt out of importing the tags (or try and remove them before the import) and then start from there.

Sunlit is also on the cards as a digital journal, but I would use this for day trips, weekends away and holidays. I’ll be honest and say that I haven’t tried this yet with Sunlit so it might not meet my expectations.

We’ll see over the next few weeks as I gradually move my journal entries out from Day One.