Ask HN: Best solutions for keeping a personal log?

I haven't quite figured out if I'll make it my todo-list/gtd solution yet, for that I'm fairly entrenched in kanban/issue-tracker apps like trello. Also wondering how to use it alongside bookmarking tools like pinboard (or if the longer goal is to have better bookmark features).

--- From the OP:

"download a csv of transactions from my bank and integrate purchases into the log"

- Depending on how much time you have, you may want to check out the beancount community / https://plaintextaccounting.org/ . I don't recommend it to people short on time to go through the learning curve, in those cases just use an existing financial app (moneydance, quicken, gnucash, etc.).

"entries for emails sent, phone calls made"

Roam could work for these use cases, see Conor's recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcNW-eidDJk

Very few people have the knowledge and interest in interacting with a bank's API, so there's little upside with a lot of downsides. Even if read-only, something like this has to be architected correctly and we all know this is most often not the case.

On the other hand, if businesses are built around these APIs, banks might perceive them as competition and no executive is going to choose to support them.

Even though I (and probably others in HN) can see the value in offering more modern banking features built in top of official APIs, just look at what has happened with e.g. Twitter's API and others. Eroding your own vendor lock-in is generally frowned-upon by most companies, no matter how much we believe it might be win-win for everyone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm9CQn07OjU

Basically, just get into the habit of logging first, then worry about making it seamless.

https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-man-book-creatin...

Go for just the highlights, ignore the noise.

Personally, I tried logging all my finances, my workouts, my diet, my car's miles, etc. for a few years. I never really could get into a very good habit of it, despite any amount of discipline/self-hatred. In the end, these partial and incomplete lists of things became more of a list of 'failures' than anything, personally. What data I could gleam from it was either obvious ('I feel bad when it's been 12+ hours since when I last ate') or they were just too noisy to really get any actionable response from.

Going for the highlights, and on an irregular schedule, was better for me personally.

The application allows users to create projects with custom tasks / notes to record data. These tasks can either include modules to store simple data (like text, task lists, etc) or integrate with NodeJs APIs (Google Drive, Calendar, etc).

I've tried to build it like a simple CMS allowing users to completely customise the tasks and notes they need.

In addition to customising the tasks, you can schedule these to be created at a later date either as a once off or recurring job.