Last yr, I introduced you 19 days of latest (to you) productiveness instruments for 2019. This yr, I am taking a distinct method: constructing an surroundings that can will let you be extra productive within the new yr, utilizing instruments you might or could not already be utilizing.
Journaling with jrnl
At my office, many people put up an “end of day” standing to Slack earlier than we depart for the day. With plenty of tasks happening and a worldwide staff, it’s a fairly good strategy to share what you bought performed, what is not performed, and what you need assistance with. But some days are so busy, so hectic that I can not keep in mind what I did. And that is the place journaling is available in.
It’s fairly straightforward to maintain a textual content editor open and simply add a line while you do one thing. But it may be difficult to return and determine while you make a selected be aware or pull out associated strains shortly and simply. Fortunately, jrnl is right here to assist.
Jrnl means that you can enter a fast entry out of your command line, search previous entries, and export to wealthy textual content codecs like HTML and Markdown. You can have a number of journals, that means you possibly can preserve your work entries separated from personal ones. It shops entries as plain textual content, so even when jrnl stops working, you might have your information.
Since jrnl is a Python program, the simplest strategy to set up it’s with pip3 set up jrnl; it will be sure to get the most recent and best model. On its first run, it can ask some questions, after which you’re good to go.
Now, each time it is advisable to make a remark or log work, merely kind jrnl <some textual content>, and will probably be logged with a timestamp to the default file. You can seek for entries on a selected date with jrnl -on YYYY-MM-DD, entries since a date with jrnl -from YYYY-MM-DD, and entries as much as a selected date with jrnl -to YYYY-MM-DD. Search phrases will be mixed with the -and parameter, permitting for searches like jrnl -from 2019-01-01 -and -to 2019-12-31.
You also can edit entries within the journal with the –edit command-line flag. Before you do, arrange your default editor for entries by enhancing the file ~/.config/jrnl/jrnl.yaml. This can also be the place you possibly can specify what recordsdata to make use of for journals, what particular character to make use of for tags, and some different choices. Right now, the essential factor is to set the editor. I exploit Vim, and jrnl’s documentation has some helpful hints for utilizing different editors like VSCode and Sublime Text.
Jrnl also can encrypt journal recordsdata. By setting the worldwide encrypt variable, you may inform jrnl to encrypt all of the journals you might have outlined. Encryption will also be set per file by including encrypt: true to the definition within the configuration file.
journals:
default: ~/journals/journal.txt
work: ~/journals/work.txt
personal:
journal: ~/journals/personal.txt
encrypt: true
If a journal is not already encrypted, you’ll be prompted for the password on any actions for that journal. The journal file will likely be saved encrypted on disk and secure from prying eyes. The jrnl documentation has much more data on the way it works, what ciphers it makes use of, and so forth.
Journaling helps me keep in mind what I did when and discover it later after I want it.