Sunday Shortcut: Interstitial Journalling
I started using Daily Notes in Roam Research a few years ago. The immediately available blank page lowered the friction of writing things down, and the outliner-style bullet points encouraged quick, snappy thoughts. I’m no longer using Roam, but this style of journalling has stuck with me.
There is a great explanation of interstitial journalling over at Ness Labs, but in short, the idea is to capture a brief snapshot of your thoughts and actions with a time stamp every time you take a break. Over the course of an average day, this gives you a great picture of both how you spent your time and how you felt about what you were doing.
This quick habit has helped me not just to be more productive, but also happier - I enjoy reflecting at the end of the day on the myriad little moments that are easy to forget. It is interesting how differently I often feel about things when reviewing at the end of the day compared to ‘in the moment’ - contrasting our experiencing selves and remembering selves in microcosm.
This week’s Shortcut provides a great option for quick capture to a daily note-style journal, whatever app you like to use. You don’t even need to open the note. By default, the Shortcut opens a text entry window, but you can also use the share sheet to send text from anywhere. I like to use Drafts for this. The text is appended along with an automatic time stamp to a ‘Quick Log’ note.
If you’d like to try it out, you can download a Day One version of the shortcut here, and an Apple Notes version here. This could be modified to work with any app (or even directly with files) which offers actions to find, create and append in Shortcuts.
As always, let me know if you have any feedback, or would like to request a shortcut, on Twitter.
Until next week,
Rebecca