I’ve been using Journelly on a daily basis for about a month now, and I wanted to reflect on how my current workflow affects my usage of Emacs in general.

As I mentioned in my post after the first week, I mostly dictate my thoughts to get them into text in Journelly; sometimes Scully speaks to her recorder as she performs her postmortem examinations.

Dictating like this, especially with my accent, is far from perfect; I’d say it roughly captures 70% of what I want to put down. It contains enough errors that I should do some quick review later in the day, especially if I want to develop these thoughts later or share them.

The other thing I do with Journelly is take pictures. Much like the dictation, these are rough and unedited, nothing like the ones I have in my photos section. A picture can quickly capture the mood and the event I’m in with the location in one quick glimpse, which works well with a journal.

Later in the day, usually before bedtime, I refile my Journelly entries into my big journal file. This is also when I transfer over photos from Journalley’s asset folder (which I host on an iCloud-shared folder on my desktop, as I explained previously) to my journal as attachments.

So far, I recaptured the proccess I more or less explained in my previous post. Not much changed. But let’s talk more about the details.

For the notes I take with dictation, I try to do at least minimal editing as soon as I’m done recording. I use Grammarly, which has a built-in keyboard app for iOS, and it’s usually good enough (after a short fight with it and iOS’s built-in spell checker on unique words and nicknames I use that don’t necessrily exist outisde of my own head) to make the entry usable - that is, to the point where I can reflect on it a year later without trying ot figure out what the I was saying.

If the entry contains something that needs a deeper intervention (for example, brainstorming or writing down notes after a meeting), I will try to do that later in the day when I get the chance or in the evening. To be honest, this part requires improvement. I leave too many notes that will confuse me later on.

For photos, I am shifting from using Photoshop to resize photos (from their default 3000 something pixel width down to 700 pixels) to using Ramirez’s awesome dwim tools - the same guy who created Journelly. If you’re reading this and you’re an Emacs power user and you don’t know about these tools, do yourself a favor and look at them right now. This post can wait. You’ll thank me later (and if you don’t believe me, check Irreal’s reviews of those as well)1. With dwim-shell-commands-resize-image-in-pixels, it’s a matter of simply marking (m in dired) the images I want to resize (usually all of them), running the command to resize, and then attaching them withorg-attach-dired-to-subtree to the entry I’m reviewing in the other window.

Two challenges with the above: first, the file names created by Journelly have unique IDs, which tell me nothing about what’s in the picture. Second, as much as I try not to edit photos that will just go in the journal, sometimes I’m itching to crop or correct the color balance. Both of these issues have simple workarounds: I can use image-dired-display-thumbs to quickly see what the image are (the thumbs buffer convinently has a frame around the thumbs I’m viewing, which corresponds to the name of the file in the list of image files in the other buffer) and then I don’t care much about the name; and for the editting - I remind myself that if I like the picture, I should work on it and edit it in its original resolution and not mess with the low quality 700px wide version anyway2.

As for refiling at the end of the day, this is straightforward enough. The only kink here is that my journal is built on a weekly date tree, which appends the most recent changes at the bottom of the file, while Journelly is doing things the opposite way and files the latest entries at the top (as it should). This means that when I capture something in my journal file through Emacs, it will be all the way down in the 2025 header, then all the way at the bottom for the current week number header, then again all the way down to the latest the day, and then once more, it will be at the bottom for the most recent entry. When I refile from Journelly, it works backwards, so I post the most recent entry at the top of that day header instead of the bottom, while the parents headers are still in a reverse order to that. Somehow, this works (at least for now), so I stick with it3.

Entries created by Journelly have the weather and location included in the properties drawer, something that’s missing from the entries I make directly to my journal with org-capture, but I can live with that. My journal template changed to look the same as Journelly’s, something similar to what I saw on Jack’s blog:

    * %U @ -
    %?

When I capture a journal entry like this through Emacs, I change the dash to add the location manually. I could get fancy with the OSM package for Emacs, which I have installed, but “home” or “office” or whatever place I happen to be in at the time is usually good enough (the temptation to create a capture template that integrates OSM into my journal entry “Journelly style” is there).

Lastly, I tried ot use Journelly more as my “brain dump” place for all my notes, including those for meetings, for example. The idea is solid, but the problem is that when I’m actually in a meeting, I have the org file with the meeting already open with the org-clock running, and adding notes to the log this way (C-c C-z) is a second nature at this point. Writing down quick notes this way feels different than writing down my thoughts in journal-style mode. I think it’s just a matter of time before I start directing all my capture notes into the journelly file so I just have one place with everything4.

Footnotes

1: When Ramirez reached out to me and asked me how I was doing with Journelly (because he’s awesome like that), he mentioned his package could help with resizing photos in an email. It was another case where I heard about something, but it never really clicked. I’m becoming more of a fan of the guy and his work, but the tools speak for themselves.

2: another solution I’m leaning into: if I take a picture that I like, I can also lightly edit it on the phone (usually cropping and level adjustment or similar) and then attach it to the entry in Journelly

3: The manual refiling system I’m describing here is cumbersome and slowly starting to annoy me. It’s also prone to mistakes. I will be better off just starting a new journal file in a reverse order, that is, with the latest entries at the top. I believe org-mode has this option built in, and if not, I’m sure there are other tools like org-reverse-datetree out there. So why haven’t I done it yet? I don’t know. It’s a huge file (my biggest org file) and one of the most important ones, so messing with it feels kind of wrong.

4 : On a technical side, this may present a syncing problem. If I use Journelly this way, its file, journelly.org, will be synced between my Mac, my iPhone, and my Linux desktop - possibly also my Android. This can cause issues with syncing. Even iCloud is not perfect, and sometimes the file won’t sync, and I only discover this when I need to use the file, thus presenting changes on top of changes that were not yet synced, which will cause a conflict or loss of data.