A couple of years ago I started hearing about this app called Day One. At the time everyone talked about how amazing it was, how beautiful it was, and how you could do so many things with it. I bought it immediately.
The app truly was beautiful but for one reason I did not use it. The app is a kind of journal. I did not journal. So I could not see how it fit into my life.
Then the makers of Day One came out with auniversal app for the iPhone and iPad. I again bought it immediately. I also thought that since I always had one of these devices with me I would journal more. That was not the case.
It wasn’t until I made a choice in my life that I wanted to start capturing more, writing more, and remembering more that this app truly started to make a difference for me. Once I shifted my thinking from “this app will change my life” to “this app can be a tool to help me accomplish something I am intentionally setting out to achieve” I found the true power, simplicity, and usefulness of it.
Day One has so many uses that I could go into: tags for journal entries, ability to take pictures, a beautiful timeline of your entries, an amazing way to search, the ability to add the weather of your current location, reminders to tell you to post, iCloud and DropBox syncing, location tagging, a quick entry menubar item so you can quickly jot a note down, and so much more.
How I Use Day One
What I want to highlight is it’s ability to just be my external brain wherever I am. It is a tool that I use to capture life’s little moments right on the spot. Whether I am at my computer, out on a walk and I have my phone, or sitting in a coffee shop reading on my iPad I have the ability to quickly jot down what I want to remember.
I am a person who likes to remember when I had some thought or when some event happened in my life. So having Day One automatically put my entry into a dated timeline is super useful. I can refer back to a date and find out what I was doing or what I was thinking or working through. I no longer have to remember everything.
The tagging system lets me quickly say that an entry is about some topic. I like to put quotes that I hear into Day One. Now I can go into Day One and search for entries with the tag of “Quote” and right there I have all the quotes I have entered into the app.
I also like to use Day One as a prayer journal, as a place where I can write about frustrating situations that I don’t want to be public, as a place to post about items that I might want to tweet or post about later, as a medical journal, as a journal for keeping track of times when my dog gets sick, and so much more.
Advanced Use of Day One
For the more technically inclined advanced users out there there is even a software tool Brett Terpstra has written called Slogger. It can take all kinds of Internet and social media items and automatically log them into your Day One app. So imaging getting all of your tweets automatically logged into this awesome journal where you are capturing everything that is going on in your life.
Why Not Just Use Evernote
I love Evernote! I use it every day for so many purposes and I wouldn’t be a very happy camper to not have access to this tool. However, Day One to me just seems more personal. It is literally like a log, book, or journal that I can look back on and know without a doubt that all the stuff in there is mine.
I love how I can see things in a timeline and go reference things that way. I like how my thoughts, quotes, prayer journals aren’t intermingled with all of the other areas of my digital life. Some note or really intimate life journal entry won’t get accidentally shared by me making a silly mistake like putting that note into the wrong shared notebook.
Maybe it’s just me but I like to have a separate app for this kind of use.
Go Get It
The cost of Day One is currently $9.99 in the Mac App Store and $4.99 in the iTunes App Store.
Check out the Day One website for even more info, a full feature set, a guide, how others are using it, and awesome screenshots showing the app in use.
Other Useful Reviews, Uses, or Podcasts Related to Day One
- Shawn Blanc’s review
- Federico Viticci review
- The Verge’s review
- Katie Floyd uses Day One as a professional journal
- Mac Power Users podcast discusses Day One in episodes #103, #117, and #118.