I’ve journaled in Day One for about 15 years now.
Over that time I’ve tried many different approaches; focusing on gratitude (3 things that sparked joy), a Today I Will/How Was Today? duo entries system, through to a return to my preferred brain dump approach. It took me a long time to get to a point that I am comfortable in my journal and not trying to force my thinking into a certain structure. Some days I write a lot, some days I write little. Some days I write more than entry, most days I don’t.
My journal is definitely a diary/memory palace as opposed to a deep seated exploration of my id.
It’s good to try new things though. I recently started a mental health check-in every Friday, using the same prompts every week1 and the difference in the answers is definitely interesting to note.
It was even easier to settle on a journalling app. Whilst I’ve lost some earlier entries to the online service I tried, Day One was simple enough to use to begin with and nicely extensible to make it a fun little app to play with.
And then along came Apple Journal. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s rubbish, but my needs are simple and it if means one less app to pay for —particularly as Day One seems to be entering it’s Evernote period of adding more and more stuff that I don’t care to use— then that’s ok by me.
My biggest blocker was the lack of an import feature for Apple Journal.
And then —thank you Reddit— I found this Apple Journal CLI.
In the words of its creator:
Read and write Apple Journal entries from the terminal. Text, photos, videos, Live Photos, web links, location pins, bookmarks, multiple journals — plus search, Markdown/JSON export, and audio transcripts. Native Swift, zero dependencies, macOS 14+.
Apple Journal has no public API, no AppleScript dictionary, and no export format worth scripting against. journal-cli talks directly to the app’s own data store, safely: reads never touch the live database, writes are guarded, backed up, and verified against Journal’s sync engine.
And it works! For a one-off import it did the job.
Use it at your own risk or, as I did, use it tandem with ChatGPT. Noting that the CLI was written with Claude, I used ChatGPT to check what it did to make sure there were no nasty surprises hiding away before I ran it.
And, with that, it’s bye bye Day One.
- Mental Health checkin questions that I use every week are:
How has my overall mood been this week?
How has my energy level been?
What has been on my mind the most?
What gave me the most enjoyment or satisfaction this week?
What caused me the most stress or frustration?
Have I felt connected to other people, or isolated?
What is one thing I’m looking forward to next week? ↩︎
What are your thoughts?