Journelly continues to grow on me

Like the title says. I've been putting more and more weight on it to handle daily "life logging" kinds of things.

Once I discovered that tagging was a first-class part of the experience in the mobile app, that made a certain sense, but I was a little hung up on the fact that #tags aren't "real org." But something Álvaro said to me as he was answering some questions I had about his roadmap bubbled to the top, which was that in Emacs he likes working with a monolithic file because swiper (fuzzy) search works really well for that.

So in the Journelly app, every #hashtag becomes a link: Tap on the link and get a search page with all the entries with that tag. In Emacs, kick off a swiper search for a #hashtag and get a list of candidate lines to go visit with that symbol in them. And if you start from your Journelly.org file having all entries collapsed, it will also open up all the headings with that tag in the document view, too. 

So the net effect is that I feel fine putting all sorts of stuff into Journelly/my Journelly.org file. I'm using hashtags liberally, and in-line as opposed to "tagging entries." (Unless I don't remember to tag inline, in which case I just toss one in at the end of the entry ... we're not being precious about it.) 

If you're keeping score on a timeline measured in decades, yes, we've basically returned to 2005, Danny O'Brien, and the dawn of the "Lifehack Age": Put stuff in a plaintext file, organize it minimally, get stuff done with an eye to the outcome, not to the proper engineering of the system to get the thing done. In the case of Journally, you can add a small layer of automation on the Emacs side to make it easier to capture stuff in it with an org-capture template, but that's just to save you the toil of opening the file, going to the top of it, cursoring down four or five lines, and typing a timestamp in:

* [2025-04-07 Mon 12:30] @ Home
This is some Journally entry.

It barely qualifies as a "format," and if you decide to take the Journally app out of the equation it's something you could easily manage with no tool at all besides a good text editor. 

Probably useless to people who very much want to have a PKM system, node maps, etc. but that's not me. 

Yeah, but for how long?

Lately, I have been benefitting a lot from habit tracking tools. I'm not going to list all the things that I have trackers for, because we'd be getting into "I never knew Mike was just three possums in a trench coat" territory. But it has helped me to make a bunch of things into streaks I want to maintain. It truly helps to look at my Flat Habits tracker and see "100%" next to all the habits I've got in there.

I made "do some kind of journal every day" a habit to track, and that has helped me remember to get something down, which has caused me to get more and more down into a journal. In addition to seeing the streak keep going, I also get to see that one big  Journelly file continue to grow. As I add and use tags, it becomes more useful. And it's not all building toward "... and now I will use to write the first of what will be dozens of books and articles," but rather "now I can tap a link to a #mood or #person's name or #concept tag and see all those entries," or "now I can swiper search on that hashtag and see all the related headings."

So I'm curious to see what happens as I add more kinds of notes to it.