Why I Switched Back To Day One

Day One is a great journaling app, and I’m back to using it. One day I’ll stop switching up my apps, but today is not that day. It’s not surprising that I changed my setup again. And it shouldn’t be surprising that I’ve chosen Day One since it’s so good at what it does.

Yes, I’ve very much jumped between different journaling solutions over the past few years. There’s always a decent reason why, something that caused me to make the moves. This time is no exception.

Previously, I was journaling in Apple Notes. It was super simple - just folders of entries in chrono order. It worked well; I even had a nice widget on my home screens to either jump straight into the current month or the day’s entry. So why migrate away from what worked?

Three strikes out of Notes

Re-org

I had a bit of time to finally better organize my Apple Notes and settled on using tags instead of folders. Once I started deleting unused folders, all my journals stuck out like a sore thumb. They no longer fit the organization scheme well. That was one factor that nudged me out a bit.

Data-loss fear

Another recent cause was seeing the image of a blank Notes screen that someone shared - it should have shown notes. Somehow, the person’s iCloud sync temporarily goofed, causing every note to vanish - scary! I was starkly reminded of how fragile all our digital ones and zeros are. I was also confronted again with the fact that Apple Notes cannot (by design!?) batch export all your notes to a file. It only lets you share out or “Open in Pages” one note at a time.

Sync glitch

For me, Apple Notes has been mostly reliable; I’ve had only a few minor glitches on rare occasion. But while recently re-organizing notes from folders to tags, guess what happened? Changes I made on my Mac did not sync to my iPhone. The issue cleared up about two days later (after a software update I think).

The bad timing of this coinciding with the above data loss scare was a two-punch combo. Add that to my initial folder-to-tag re-org: three strikes, I’m out.

Why Day One?

I chose Day One again simply because it’s an excellent journaling app, one of the best. I’m familiar with it and still have my annual subscription going from last year. And it has the ability to import/export all entries, which Apple Notes lacks. I make my own backups in json and text files.

Day One is also better than before because Automattic, its new-ish owner, made an Android app and a web app (still in beta). In other words, Day One is now cross-platform and not an Apple-only citizen, which is ideal.

I briefly considered Journey (which I enjoyed before on Android and Chromebook) or other solutions, but Day One ranks at the top of the list. So I’ve moved (one at a time) all my recent entries from Notes to Day One (all my previous entires were still intact from when I last used Day One). And you know what? It’s nice!

Notes

My actual notes are still in Apple Notes with my new tags setup. I’ve been relying on it more for web research, links, quotes, and other things. The Quick Note feature is super handy. And once all my old journal entires and folders are deleted, there will be less data in Notes to sync, and it will be easier to manage the notes that remain.

I’ve also downloaded a copy of all my notes from Apple since it’s the only way to “export” everything at once. It gives you a bunch of text files, but you must wait a few days after requesting your data, which is better than nothing.

Apple can (and should) do better by allowing you to easily export all your notes via a menu bar command.

An alternative is to use an import plug-in within Obsidian (another notes app) to extract all your Apple Notes. But “normal” people shouldn’t have to resort to such measures to ensure they can get their own backup copies of their own data out of the Apple Notes silo.

Final thoughts

It’s fair to doubt that this time will be the last time I switch my journaling setup. But then again, I’m aiming to settle into Day One for the long-haul. I can see it serving me better over time as I put more entries into it. It’s a well-established app with a good owner. And its feature set, while a bit too robust for my taste, is great overall and implemented nicely.

Day One is so good that I plan to renew my subscription. Voting with my dollars is a good sign of real buy-in, as is the switching cost I’ve paid to move my journal entries from Notes to Day One.

And maybe one day, I’ll stop switching apps. Or maybe not.