The One and Only Daily Note Shortcut You Will Need
This one will be short (and nerdy).
For all the users of Bear 2 or almost any other Markdown-based Mac tools that support shortcuts — this little note might be useful. And based on the comments I got on my previous articles, it might save some time for the world ;)
First of all, just for the background, I have to say I still think Daily Notes are one of the greatest tools for personal productivity that allow you to have a single place for all the things that you face throughout the day. Not only they are time- and brain-savers that help to make decisions faster, they also can serve as a great canvas that is being “reset” every day.
There are some applications that have Daily Notes functionality built-in (like Craft or NotePlan), but there are some absolutely amazing note-taking applications that concentrate more on a writing experience and tons of other things, rather than being “daily-note friendly”.
And the good news is that for those markdown-based applications that support Apple Shortcuts there might be a good way out that will be helping you every single day — in 1 click. I look at Bear Notes in this example, but the same principles can be applied to many other note-taking apps.
Alright. So the end result we are looking for is something like that:
As you can see there are sections for events, tasks and notes. Also, there are little shortcuts that allow you to move between the “days” easily.
And now here’s an overview of how to get there:
Let me explain what’s going on. There are some little tricks here and there that ensure consistent (and nicely looking) results.
- First step is to get all the upcoming events for today. I limit this to 30 but you can set your own number. What I learned 10 or 15 sometimes miss events (maybe some Shortcuts’ bug or an unclear underlying logic..)
- Then for each event you get event start time and its title and store the results in the Text operator
- Then you get the Weather in your location (totally optional)
- Then you do 2 calculations for “yesterday” and “tomorrow” — this is exactly needed for the easy navigation between the nearby daily notes you’ll see later
- “Current Date” Date Format should be set to “Long ”, while Time Format to “None”. This way you’ll get consistently formatted daily note titles
6. Then you look for already existing Daily Note for today. Make sure to precisely look for “# Current Date” (with double quotes) to find the exact match and prevent this thing from creating duplicates.
7. If something is found, the shortcut will open today’s daily note.
8. If nothing is found, it will pass the results of all the previous steps into the note content.
9. The text we’re looking for is reflected on the screenshot:
10. At the top of the section <- [[Adjusted date]] on the left obviously refers to the “Day -1” variable and the right one to “Day +1” variable.
11. Note there is a little step of formatting the Tags section — in Bear I normally like it hidden, but that’s totally optional:
#### Tags<! - {"fold":true} →
#Planner/Daily Notes#12. Another optional step is to populate the “Tasks” section from the Todo application of your choice. Obviously, it has to support Shortcuts in the first place. Things 3, Reminders, TickTick, GoodTasks worked well when I checked.
That’s basically it. You can run it manually, from any device — Mac, iPhone, iPad — any time of the day. First run will create a new note, all the next runs will open the existing one (only within one particular day, obviously). If you’d like to go further you can automate the shortcut run through Shortcut’s Automations and configure its automatic execution it to something like 7am every day.
Let all your days be great! :)
P.S. If you need more info on Bear 2 — check out this article on 2.0 features and this one for an in-depth review.
P.P.S. The shortcut is available here:
P.P.P.S How about going further into OCD replacing NotePlan & Craft?.. 😉
