Ask HN: Best solutions for keeping a personal log?

Lately I've been working toward keeping a logbook of what I've been up to throughout the day. I've been using things.app to record things as completed tasks, which has the advantage of being available on both computer and phone and seamlessly sync'ed up.

But I'm interested in being able to pull in more automation--for example, download a csv of transactions from my bank and integrate purchases into the log, maybe add in entries for emails sent, phone calls made. The goal is to capture information passively enough that I can add context and commentary when I want to without spending more time on it than it's worth. I have an idea that it would be helpful for me to be able to look back and get a long term sense of things that I'm doing and interested about.

Do you know of any tools that might make that easier to accomplish? I struggled to find a general purpose app for the iPhone to write new records to a database, and I thought about using a google form but I don't want to have to manually record the time. I thought about sending emails to a specific address, but I couldn't come up with a simple way to do the kind of purchase integration that I'd like to do, and I have a hunch that the whole thing is really only going to be useable if it ends up in a database or spreadsheet form.

With all the personal data collection going on right now I think it would be interesting to start trying to use similar tactics to bring more of my attention to the decisions I'm making about how to spend my time and focus.

> The goal is to capture information passively enough

This is my top one issue, because most logging apps require constant manual inputs and commitment, but not all.

Recently, I have been using Journey [0], an app that is helping me in the difficult task to write entries nearly every day. Problem: those are free-form, so it's only a good old journal, not a tracking app for custom metrics.

I have tried using another app to track my food habits [1] but that required way too much effort to get it right (finding the right food for every intake is just too much, I'd rather wait for something more automated like computer vision accurately seeing what I am eating, and how much of it).

I passively track my spendings, cross accounts with an bank aggregator called Bankin [2] (EU focused). From it, I can export the normalized data. You should look into similar services.

> a general purpose app for the iPhone to write new records to a database

I don't like it, but Notion [3] does that.

In the end, if you're committed, a spreadsheet is not that bad to start prototyping and checking what your really need.

Don't forget passive tracking with apps such as Google Fit, Swarm (Foursquare), Google Location, etc.

[0] https://2appstudio.com/journey/

[1] https://lifesum.com/

[2] https://bankin.com/en/home.html

[3] https://www.notion.so/

Thanks for the suggestion! I think one of the big strengths of Jrnl.sh is the simplicity, the end result is useable and straightforward. I wish it could be easier to use a phone to append lines to something like this, I thought about trying to make a shortcut that could do the trick, and then manually transforming and integrating the contents of other sources like transactions periodically. My worry is that manual steps in the process end up making the whole effort too troublesome.

I've taken the odd approach of messaging myself in chat software.. in my case, I have "conversations" with myself in Telegram. I feel like I journal more when it's just text and unstructured, rather than, for instance, a detailed form.

It's not exactly what you are looking for, but has some good properties:

- Always easy to jump in to, since I use TG to chat with people all day long; works on all devices (I need to journal from desktop and mobile)

- Easy to forward in/out notes to/from others

- No formatting woes since it's pretty much open ended. Supports hash tags and search. Can easily find all media and links.

- Telegram already supports tons of different kinds of media files and attachments; can easily snap of a pic of what I'm doing

- Can easily export HTML archive of convo at any time for analysis in other software

With my setup you'd have trouble automatically injecting content from programs, but you could make a Telegram bot that does that work, and just have conversations with it instead of yourself. (Telegram's API is incredibly simple to get started with and doesn't even require webhooks)

I’ve been using Day One for a while. I started using it in 2012 as a simple journal but it became a essential tool in logging my life.