A couple of people wrote back to me regarding my last post about the challenges I have with Journelly (which, again, don’t really have anything to do with the app itself, but my workflow).

In an Email, HTH let me know that while Syncthing is not officially supported on iOS, there is an app that works and does the job just fine: SyncTrain. I tested it, and it successfully synced my files to my iPhone, iCloud not included. That’s an amazing find.

Meanwhile, I was thinking about how I can better streamline my process of refiling Journelly’s entries to my journal, where they are… archived. Duh! I can simply use org-mode to archive entries into my journal file. All I need to do is define the file I want them to archive into in the file options at the start of the file. Journelly even has an archive feature built in, but since I want to save my entries off the phone, it won’t work for me.

However, I realized I might not want to send my Journelly entries away. Journelly is convenient, and I use it constantly for notes. Having these available on my iPhone (where Journelly has an excellent search feature with tags) and on Emacs on the Mac at the same time is a boon to my productivity, not to mention, it just looks so nice on the phone.

So now I’m considering a different mental approach. Instead of refiling and moving entries away from Journelly, I’m going to try and expand on what I have there later. Some of this I already discussed before: things like meeting entries, for example, can be copied later to my dedicated meeting file, and activities can be copied to my event file, if I feel there’s more to add. The missing piece is expanding on “mind dumps” in Journelly that go into tangents. For that, I want to break the ideas into specific subjects with Denote later. For example, if I write an entry in the morning about Journelly and I’m realizing I’m rambling about the app and have ideas, I can later put these ideas into a “Journelly thoughts” note later with Denote, along with the appropriate keywords and attachments, as needed. This, I think, also covers the concern I have regarding privacy and iCloud, as the Journelly entry will just cover the initial nugget, where I will write some key points which I will later develop in a dedicated note off Apple’s servers.

This is all pretty new and raw in my head, so I’m going to try that out for the rest of the week and see how I feel.