Ask HN: Best solutions for keeping a personal log?

Life has changed recently and I've been thinking about some low-friction options for capturing thoughts. Any solution needs to work from mobile and desktop (macOS, Windows, and Linux for me.)

On desktop I'm imagining something like an Alfred window popping up on a keyboard shortcut. Storing the text note or screenshot with timestamp. Nothing precludes audio, or any other format, but the capture tool needs to load immediately, capture whatever, and disappear into the background. It'd then bug me at specific times to group these notes or add some context.

I'd be able to "zoom" by hour, day, week. It would work out what was during work hours and what was outside of work time, but I'd still be able to indicate personal or work. Tagging would be available, but not required.

I could take some note, or a group of notes "forward" to another tool. It'd store a link to that next system (Trello, work bug tracker, etc.) so I'd know the items were "actioned" in some way.

I'm not aware of any tool which really does this. Note-taking tools are developed for folks who love creating notes and not for people who don't love doing this (or have had excellent memories up to now and skipped development a love for taking a note on everything!)

Don't have iphone, so don't know about the apps. But, even if I didn't have any org-mode specific apps, a tool that merely indexed org-mode files as plaintext and allowed me to search it would already be massively helpful.

For synchronising files across your phone and computer, I'm sure there is Dropbox or Syncthing for Iphone. It's periodic sync, so there is slight possibility of conflicts, but if you use separate files to log on desktop and phone, just merging them now and then, it's not an issue.

In the past I played with exporting the log and then drawing a word cloud (by week) with Mathematica. It gives you some interesting insights into whats going on in your life in that period.

Other cool features that would be nice: structure extraction (i.e., msg myself `#food #lunch cheeseburger` and `#mood tired` and then building a CSV of only what I ate vs how I felt), reminders (to encourage you to journal every so often, or to quickly have the bot remind you to check on something 12 hours from now), automatically posting external stuff like uptime alerts, calendar entries or commit logs, and other stuff I can't think of right now.. :)

Personally, at the end of each work day, I use the spreadsheet method to record my progress for that day. I have one column for the date and one for a 1 or 2-sentence summary or notes about what I did during the day. I've been doing this for years and it's nice to have a historic "captain's log" of my work.

It would be easy to add more columns to this type of spreadsheet to break the day into hourly increments or even 15 minute increments. Any shorter than 15 mins and it's too easy to get frustrated by the interruption of needing to write the log. Hourly would probably be more realistic.

In Google Sheets, use command-shift-colon to do a timestamp.

Supplement this approach with a small paper notebook (originally I used 3x5inch pocket then moved to a 5x8 inch) where you no longer need your phone/computer to log entries (enter them later). I'm collecting a nice physical library of notebooks that are chronologically ordered and contain everything from in depth technical tasks to notes on groceries. Also acts as a good spot for stickers collected on your travels.

Regarding transactions, I've started using everydollar.com. I've only started using it in 2019 so I cannot 100% vouch for it yet.