A journal in Evernote Now, let me start off by saying that Evernote isn’t the only medium for journaling out there. I’ve actually got a Moleskine notebook which I still write in from time to time. There are also a million journaling and writing apps that do the same thing. In this week’s episode, I show you how to set up a journal in Evernote so you can keep track of your events, thoughts, ideas and so much more.

1. Work Journal In Evernote
2. Creating A Digital Journal In Evernote
3. Bullet Journal In Evernote
4. Bullet Journal In Evernote
5. Journal In Evernote

Building on yesterday’s post on an improved template system for EvernoteI’d like to share with you how I use a variation on this system tocreate a daily journal template.

Work Journal In Evernote

Several years ago I got fed up with getting to the end of a day andwondering where my day had gone and what I’d really achieved. Tickedoff to-do lists only ever told a fraction of the story so I began tokeep a daily journal. This has taken a variety of forms but now itlives in Evernote. Each day as I do things Ilog it. Five seconds logging anything from phone calls and e-mails toissues resolved and meetings attended. This lets me keep track ofthings from a day to day point of view (making me feel better about whatI’ve achieved) and it also helps me pull together reports on what I andmy team have been doing or even for my formal reviews. Journalling inEvernote keeps everything at my fingertips.

From that you can probably guess that I really like to have things justso. This includes the format of my journal. So that I can keep thingsup to date on my iPod touch and my PC I simply have one row per item (Igave up on bullet points as the iPod doesn’t support editing these(yet)). I have the note tagged as “Journal” and currently I keep it inan Evernote notebook also called “Journal”. So this all seems prettystraight forward and could easily be accomplished using the systemdescribed in my earlier post. The issue for me is that the title ofeach note is the date it is the journal for.

Sometimes I might create several days journals on the same dayretrospectively (e.g. after being off ill or on a course) and so havingthe date in the title is really helpful in sorting as the creation andmodified dates don’t necessarily relate to the date of the activities. I also have the date in the format “yyyy-mm-dd” to support the option tosort.

Creating A Digital Journal In Evernote

So this means that in order to create a template to create a journalnote for ‘today’, it would need to introduce some dynamically generatedcontent in the form of the date.

For any keen scripters out there, the answer and principles are probablyquite obvious and you could effectively write a script to dynamicallypopulate the note with information in any number of ways. Since this isjust dealing with the current date I was actually able to just get awaywith a few DOS commands in a batch file as shown below.

The script is relatively straight forward. It begins by setting severalvariables which indicate where to files - theENSCRIPTexecutable and the Evernote database. This is followed by the locationof three further files.

The first two of these are the static parts of the note - in this casethe first file contains everything before the note’s title and thesecond everything after the note’s title. The content of these twofiles can be seen below. The third file is just a file used temporarilyto build the note to be imported into Evernote.

The last variable is simply the name of the notebook I want the Journalnote to appear in.

Bullet Journal In Evernote

With the variables set the next section concatenates the pre-title notecontent with the date in the desired format and the post-title notecontent. These are all output into the file to be imported.

The next step is the actual import of the generated note into Evernoteand once that has been done, the script removes the generated note file,clears out the variables and closes.

In case you are wondering what the content of the pre-title andpost-title files are, the contents are shown below.

Pre-title File

Post-title File

I find this script much quicker to run than creating the new note in theright notebook, typing in the date (after trying to recall what it is)and then adding the tag. I simply trigger it from PS menu (see previous article)and that’s it done.

The one thing it’s missing for me is automatically selecting the note inEvernote. It’s something I can live with for now because it’s still alittle quicker for me than creating it myself, but until a fullyintegrated template system becomes available in Evernote I think this isabout as good as I’m going to get it.

Bullet Journal In Evernote

Related posts that you may also like to read

Journal In Evernote

• Revisiting an Evernote Daily Journal

  31 Oct 2020

  I’ve been a long time Evernote user and while the application and services have certainly seen a lot of issues arising in the last decade, I still rely on it for some of my workflows. One of these is my daily journal, and this is a topic I have written about several times before. I recently had a bit of a change to this, and it is time for another quick write-up.

  Read More

• Evernote Search+: An Alfred 2.0 Workflow for searching Evernote

  15 Jan 2013

  Alfred is an essential app for many Mac users,myself included. It is so much more than an application launcher and asof this last weekend, version 2.0 has been released to beta testers.

  Read More

• Quick Copy Evernote Note Links

  31 Jul 2012

  A little while back I was scanning through some questions onQuorawhen I spotted one relating to Evernote that Ithought I could help with. The question was “Is there a shortcut tocopy the note URL in Evernote on Windows”….

  Read More

• Three Quick Tips for Evernote Clearly

  24 Mar 2012

  Clearly is a browser add-on created bythe team at Evernote. It allows you to reformatthe content of a web page into a cleaner simpler one for easier reading(like Readability) and of course also integrates seamlessly intoEvernote. This application fits my way of consuming and savinginteresting articles almost (see later) perfectly and I thought I’dshare with you a few features you may not be so familiar with.

  Read More