Journalling / dates in Notes....

DaveT

…So, I’m trying to pick up on some ideas that floated around the Slack channel for a while and that I’d like to not lose - hopefully I’ve captured the essence. From my previous slack post(s), in essence:

I have an AutoHotkey user-specified key mapping (that I use all the time) to insert todays date at the cursor across all apps. I use this to note dates when somethig is done or progressed, thus creating a diary of past effort on a job (many tasks involves chasing up / progressing an action several times). This is a ‘text’ date, ie., one that specifically is not a Legend Task Date. It’s merely a record of past actions. I use Legend Notes as a way of keeping this diary (journal!), but Notes do not accept my AUTOHOTKEY insert so I have to manually type. But Legend Panes do accept my auto date insert.

I think that this concept is similar to what @Jerud has asked for with his past ‘journalling’ thread(s) - although I think he wants this in a Pane not necessarily in a Note(?). Here’s a just-made-up example:

So:
(a) please could we have the ability in Notes to allow autohotkey to insert text at a cursor?
(b) and / or, if we allow multi-line ‘tasks’ in a pane (something reccently discussed here), I guess that I could use that to create my diary similar to the above?

Jerud

Thanks for resurrecting this topic. I would have eventually gotten around to it myself but this is way better!
Notes not-accepting AutoHotKey input sounds like a straight-up technical bug. I dunno why that shouldn’t work. You can paste a whole webpage into a Note (try it!) – so hopefully the fix for your above is a simple bug-squashing.

I’m currently using Outlook to Journal because it handles images better, handles tables (I use tables a lot both personally and professionally to wrap my mind around things), because the mobile app (where most of my journal entries come from) is more robust, and because there’s simply no functional advantage to using Legend. OneNote has a baked-in date/time stamp hotkey, which can be configured with custom formatting. It’s not searchable or sortable like it would be in Legend, but it’s better than paper ; )

My style of using Legend is different from yours. I find that Notes are generally parenthetical asides to their item, or simple status updates (aka “waiting on shipment; tracking # xxx”). I usually end up typing in a paragraph of text to an item, realize I was too verbose, then select all but the first sentence and cut/paste that into the Note. I often actually type all that inside actual parenthesis when I first write it before realizing what I’ve done! I need more discipline. If there were a hotkey for “send everything after the first period to the Note” I would use it a dozen times a day!

Journal entries, to me, are “primary data” and would not be tucked away in a Note. If I wanted to group entries up, I’d just roll them into a parent item…since indent-depth is unlimited there’s no reason not to do this. The only time I might put a running log into a Note is for tiny tasks, such as a phone call, where I’ll log each time I call, am waiting for the returned call, etc. until the exchange is resolved. This is info that has value while the task is still open, but will almost definitely not be important to me once it’s completed.

For me, the task for the call itself – that’s the journal entry. Legend is already logging created/modified/scheduled/completed dates for every item. So the main gist of my foregoing Slack posts was that with a few more (seemingly simple) tools I could leverage what Legend is already doing and extract from that an extremely flexible and functional Journaling system. With such an arrangement, I could simply dump entries into a document from my laptop, phone, etc. without even really caring where they land in the Document. So long as I applied appropriate tags, I could build a Pane to show me pretty much anything I wanted. A list of all the things I did, in the order I did them, for a single day, week, month? Sure. Only tasks related to work? Yes. To a specific client (for billing purposes)? No problem. Reverse-sorted and filtered on my “waiting for response” priority so I can see all entries that need followup, with the oldest ones first? Yep! All from a simple, single – maybe even totally flat – Document. I would never need to even look at the Outline; I could interface entirely via filtered and sorted Panes. And I’d never have to type a single date, unless I was back-dating an entry to catch up from a day away from the computer. That’s the dream!

The changes that would be needed are:

User-editable created, modified, completed dates
BUT, also control over which of those dates can be modified (relevant for applications with strict data integrity requirements, or in shared docs)
Myriad improvements to how the current Group-By-<date> Panes work; today they are pretty jumbled.