The Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library. It’s just a few subway stops from our apartment, so I’m able to spend time here often. What an inspiring place for a reader or writer!

The Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library. It’s just a few subway stops from our apartment, so I’m able to spend time here often. What an inspiring place for a reader or writer!
Wednesday, May 7, 2025 • 1 min read
One of the things I love about keeping a journal is how a past entry can transport me so completely back in time to that moment. Here’s a passage from my journal on this day eight years ago:
I try to soak this in - the goldfinches perched on the feeders, fluttering and pestering one another for the best feeding spot, Puget Sound so blue and ruffled, distorted by the heat of the fire, the sight and smell of fresh cut grass, so green and healthy, the sounds of birds in every direction announcing their delight that spring has sprung. Ah yes.
Reading this, I am back on the porch of our old house, basking in the newfound sun after a long Pacific Northwest winter. I hear the birdsong. I see the ruffled waves on the blue water.
My life is so different now. I am worlds away from where I was back then. But in the space of a paragraph, I am transported.
Savor the moments. Write what you feel and see in a journal. Write something every day if you can. Practice time travel.
After poking and prodding the capabilities of Micro.blog for the past 18 months, I have decided to consolidate my online writing on Wordpress where I’ve kept a blog for more than a decade.
This wasn’t an easy decision. Micro.blog is an innovative, capable, affordable service run by a smart, conscientious entrepreneur. It balances simplicity and power like no other blogging platform.
I’m always curious about why a blogger leaves a certain platform and moves to another. In case this is helpful to others, I’m sharing why I am making this change.
The main reason centers around reading tools. Almost 90% of what I posted on Micro.blog relates to books. Micro.blog has some good reading support, but can’t display thumbnail images of covers within posts or allow links from the bookshelf back to the post about the book. I tried many workarounds, but I could never find a solution that made sense. Wordpress, with all its complexity, made this pretty easy. Here’s a link to my bookshelf with the functionality in Wordpress I wasn’t able to implement in Micro.blog.
Further, I’m feeling less and less inclined to share or participate in social platforms of any kind. I am weaning myself off of anything with a time-sensitive feed, including even wholesome ones like Micro.blog. I prefer the more timeless approach of blogs, where the reader and the writer meet only when the time is right — through a fortuitous web search, a Sunday afternoon RSS digest, or a friendship forged in the ether through common interests.
Finally, I have a long history of writing and interacting with readers on Wordpress. Consolidating everything to Micro.blog would mean losing hundreds of comments over the years. For me, this felt like too great of a loss.
A quick word about how long posts and short posts coexist on Wordpress. I worried that a consolidated blog would see my longer essays overwhelmed by the avalanche of short posts. I solved this by creating a subdomain for shorter posts (blog.robertbreen.com), while continuing to publish essays and longer posts at robertbreen.com. This keeps the two types of posts segregated, yet still allowing seamless navigation for the reader. I like how it all came together.
While I won’t post here again, I will keep tabs on the many bloggers I met on Micro.blog through my RSS reader — please keep writing! And I tip my cap to Manton Reece, whose brilliance and heroics have provided an incredible voice and platform for so many.
Friday, March 7, 2025 • 5 min read
A few weeks ago, I came across a blog post about the author’s reasons for switching to a different everyday-carry notebook. I love posts like these, and this one had me clicking on websites, blog posts, and videos about notebooks and pens until long past bedtime.
For some, it can be difficult to resist the possibility that a new notebook or pen might help squeeze more insightful words onto a blank page. There’s a reason I highlighted this passage from Todd Henry’s Daily Creative:
Sometimes the feel of a new tool in your hands is all it takes to create a spark: a new keyboard for your computer, a new pen or notebook. There’s no magic in the tool; it’s how the new tool makes you feel about working, how it invites you back into your craft.
I love digital note-taking and spend a lot of time organizing and linking my reading and knowledge notes. But I sometimes question whether that investment will ever pay off.
A few months ago, I traced my last dozen writing projects back to where the ideas first originated. I hoped many spawned from insights born out of the interconnected links and backlinks in my note-taking system. But, no. Every one took shape in the pages of my handwritten journal, often followed by mental acrobatics played out on the surface of 4x6 index cards. Only later did a keyboard take part. Even after I had a working draft of an essay, I almost always returned to my journal to question my thinking. Many essays took a new direction after these mid-stream journaling sessions.
Despite a fascination with digital tools, pen and paper is where my real thinking happens.
That being so, I may have written too much about apps and software if the creative spark takes place elsewhere. So, today, I’m sharing the analog tools I use daily. And surprise, surprise: writing this post led me to a rewarding discovery.
For the past three years, I’ve used this notebook from Scribbles That Matter (STM) as my paper journal. I wake up early and write in this notebook every morning over coffee. I love the larger B5 size for more expansive thinking. The STM has 213 high-quality dotted and numbered pages (120 GSM), a few index pages, a pocket in the back to stash notecards, two place-marking ribbons, a loop to hold a pen, an elastic band to keep it closed, and even a slipcase for storage. The notebook lays flat when opened, yet its binding remains tight even after a year of daily use. This notebook hits all my buttons.
About a year ago, I graduated from cheap Amazon basic 4x6 notecards to Notsu dot grid index cards. These are made from thick (350 gsm) card stock with subtle dots and rounded edges. Unlike cheaper ones, my pen glides over the smooth surface of these high-quality cards. They are thick enough to handle permanent markers without bleeding and withstand almost any abuse without crumpling.
I’ve managed to stay away from using fancy pens in my notebooks and journals. I’ve bought a few nice pens over the years, only to realize I didn’t enjoy writing with them. I tried fountain pens but found them fussy and precious. I’ve come to accept that my southpaw scrawl is more suited for ballpoints than nibs and special ink.
For the past three or four years, I’ve written every day with a Pentel Energel 0.5 Needle Tip pen. The Energel’s water-based gel ink flows evenly on the page without smearing or skipping, even with my awkward left-handed slant. The 0.5mm fine tip lets me write with uncanny precision. I prefer blue ink in my notebooks and journals. Traditional black is far too grown-up for me. Pentel’s shade of blue is perfect. And it’s affordable. The pen costs just $1.39 when purchased in bulk.
After discovering the Pentel, I bought several dozen from Amazon, fearing they might one day be discontinued. After a while, throwing away an entire pen felt wasteful, so I started buying just the refills, which cost a mere $0.60 each.
After reading the aforementioned blog post and researching the Mark Two pen and its companions, I began to examine the body of the Pentel more critically. While the ink flows like magic, the pen itself is a plasticky piece of junk.
I was still pondering this illogical allure of fancy pens a few days later when I had an idea. What if someone makes a nice pen body that accepts Energel refills? Is that even a thing?
I asked ChatGPT. “Certainly,” it replied, and it spat out five higher-end pens that accept the Energel refill. My heart began to beat a little faster.
Two suggestions didn’t fit my style, and two required trimming the refill to fit. But one, the AI’s top recommendation, looked very, very promising.
Two hours later, after studying another slew of videos and Reddit posts, I ordered the $100 Big Idea Design Dual Side Click Pen in stonewashed titanium.
I’ve been writing with this pen for two weeks now. Due to its unique adjustable design, it accepts Energel refills and a hundred others. The refill fits snugly and doesn’t wiggle or wobble. The titanium version weighs 28 grams, a little over twice as much as the Pentel. It’s just enough extra weight to coax the ink to flow even better on the page. The copper or zirconium (!) versions would be too heavy to hold for long stretches.
Engaging the pen feels more like chambering a round than the bouncy click of the Pentel. Pressing either side button gives a satisfying thunk as the pen disengages. When I pull the pen out of the loop of my journal, a sound like a crisp finger-snap erupts from the titanium clip (yes, even the clip is titanium).
It took no time to fall in love with this pen—a beautiful, understated, utilitarian badass that accepts my beloved refills.
And since it’s backed by a lifetime warranty, this could be the last pen I ever buy.
Of course, I’m already eyeing the bolt-action model and perhaps a mini version to carry with my pocket notebook.
This, my pen enthusiast friends tell me, is how it begins.
My blog had its tenth birthday last July, and I forgot to celebrate: Why Blogs Matter
Thursday, February 6, 2025 • 10 min read
This blog had its tenth birthday last July, and I forgot to celebrate.
I had no idea what I was doing when I shared that first essay in 2014. Since then, I’ve written about a hundred more posts. Each is now swirling around the ether, a faint signal in the noise for those who share an interest in keeping a journal, or reading great books, or managing finances on a Mac, or taking better notes. Or being a better father, or living aboard a boat, or suffering an unimaginable loss.
An odd assortment, I know.
Readers from sixty countries have visited my blog. I have corresponded with dozens of people with questions or comments about what I’ve written. I’ve also become friends with other bloggers who care deeply about many of the same things. It’s a marvel of the internet age that we have this medium to find each other, rare and valuable needles in an unending hayloft.
Who knew such a thing could evolve from sharing that first essay?
I recall my teenage son’s bemusement when he discovered I kept a blog. “Dad, what? You’re a blogger now?” he asked with a chuckle. Back then, blogs were not cool (sadly, they are still not). I read more than a few articles at the time that said the glory days of blogging were long past.
I didn’t fully understand what I had started. I knew sharing my experiences could make a small difference in the lives of others who sought a similar path in life. I wanted a way to practice writing that didn’t involve business jargon. And even then, I knew I wanted to carve out my own place on the internet away from the ilk of Twitter or FaceBook. But I still didn’t know what I was doing.
Ten years later, I have a better idea about why keeping a blog matters to me:
1. To find my voice. It took staring down my 50th birthday to believe I had a valuable perspective to share. My writing to that point had been private musings in a journal or business memos.
In 2014, I took a sabbatical from work, which profoundly changed me. I started to look at the world as a writer might, thinking differently about life, family, and our purpose here on earth. While I enjoyed my career in finance and strategy, I yearned to explore broader, more humane interests. Over time, the blog became an outlet for these thoughts, helping me find a writing voice free from financial acronyms and corporate buzzwords. I am thankful for this.
And while the writing itself is never easy for me, I love the outcome of having written.
2. To discover what I think. It’s easy to fool yourself in a journal by writing open-ended, rambling thoughts without any conclusion or action. But writing for an unknown audience requires more thought and rigor. I have to open my mind to the variety of perspectives others might bring to the subject, which helps me avoid tunnel vision and insular thinking.
Writing a longer post or essay forces me to explore a topic more deeply than I otherwise would. I’ve reshaped dozens of posts after discovering — once I started writing — that I no longer believed my original surface-level premise.
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
— Joan Didion, Let Me Tell You What I Mean
Writing gathers a hundred swirling half-notions and back-eddies into an orderly stream of coherent thought. Writing for others dredges that stream into a navigable river we can travel down together.
So, yeah. Keeping a blog makes you smarter.
3. For connection. The internet can be an awful place, but sometimes it can surprise you. Through blogging, I have connected with many interesting people who reached out after reading one of my posts.
These connections mostly happen through blog comments. When someone replies, I get a little ping on my phone. This always brings a smile to my face. Often, the comment provides a unique perspective that shifts how I think about what I’ve written. Sometimes, a caring person wants to compliment my writing or express compassion for something I’ve faced. Blog comments are one of the ways I know that most people are kind and good.
Many bloggers worry about allowing comments on their posts. I get this. I use the Akismet spam filter, which has blocked over two thousand (!) spam comments over the life of this blog. The plug-in whisks them away before I even see them. In ten years, I’ve encountered less than a handful of inappropriate replies. Maybe I’ve been lucky. It sure isn’t this way on web forums or social media. Still, I doubt I would have kept up this blog without this ongoing stream of feedback and encouragement.
I spend about $200 a year between hosting and domain registrations to keep this blog running. Why spend all that when I could post my thoughts on social media for free?
First, sites like Facebook and X and their algorithmic cousins aren’t the right place for long-form writing. Attention spans max out around 15 seconds on those endless scroll sites. Few will take the time to read a 2,000-word essay.
Second, the posts on these sites are often staged to make life seem a little too perfect. Instagram influencers have made this an art. It’s all so fake. The best blogs tell it like it is, the good and the bad. The glass may be half full, but it’s never overflowing.
Finally, I would much rather pay for my little corner of the internet than allow my writing to be a source of profit for politically-minded billionaires. But that’s me. I’m not part of their target market.
I follow a few excellent writers on SubStack and have shared some essays on Medium. Both are free to writers and offer a simple way to get started with little effort or complexity. But they’re not for me. I have no desire to monetize my writing. I’ll never allow ads on my blog. I am not interested in growing my subscriber base or offering a paid newsletter. I don’t want barriers between my writing and potential readers.
To me, these platforms feel like just more sophisticated forms of social media, with many contributors striving to collect followers at the expense of thoughtful writing. I understand writers need an income, so I don’t begrudge this approach. It’s just not something I need or want.
My blog operates on the open-source version of WordPress on a third-party host. WordPress powers almost half the internet, so it's incredibly robust and customizable. And complicated.
A little over a year ago, I started using Micro.blog for shorter posts I might otherwise have shared on social media. Micro.blog is a little hard to describe. It’s a hosting platform, an Indie web community of like-minded bloggers, and a cross-posting service that enables the POSSE ("Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere”) model of blogging.
Over the past year, I shared around a hundred posts on Micro.blog. Most of these relate to books I've read, inspiring quotes, links to interesting articles, or travel photography. Micro.blog syndicates these automatically to accounts on Bluesky and Mastodon. I keep a rolling feed of these on my home page.
I considered merging WordPress into Micro.blog to make things easier on myself. I’ve never been happy with the format of emails that WordPress sends out to subscribers, nor do I like that readers need an account to subscribe or like a post. Maintaining a WordPress blog is complex with all its settings, CSS styles, and plug-ins. Things seem to break a lot. Using Micro.blog would be a comparative breeze.
When I tested merging the sites, the flood of short posts overwhelmed and obscured the longer, more meaningful essays, making the site feel cluttered. In addition, the hundreds of comments posted on this blog over the years would not carry over. Losing all that feedback felt like too much of a loss. After all, this is a collaborative effort.
So, for now, these two sites stand apart, serving different purposes.1
I follow about 75 blogs using the Unread RSS reader. Some publish every day, others less frequently. I’m sharing four of my absolute favorites. Each represents an inspiration to me of what a personal blog can be.
Recently, a blog I follow ended its seventeen-year run with this sad farewell:
I do think that the end really is here for the blogosphere though. This time it really is different. I’ve weathered many ups and downs in the blogosphere over my 17 years in it, but now it feels like the end of the blogging era.
Maybe this veteran blogger is correct. Perhaps it’s silly to keep a blog in this age of artificial intelligence and ubiquitous social media. Maybe, after all these years of gloomy predictions, it really is the end of blogs.
But here’s the thing. Our attitudes naturally shift from optimism when we are young to meliorism (the belief that the world can be made better with effort) when we are middle-aged, and finally, to cranky pessimism when we are old. I feel the pull, but I refuse to give in to pessimism.
So, call me cautiously optimistic about the future of blogging. Registering a personal domain and starting a blog has never been easier. Indie web firms like Micro.blog are helping creatives take ownership of their online contributions instead of depending on platforms that trap and resell their content. More and more people are recoiling from social media’s apparent bias, algorithmic manipulation, and spin. The need for online truth and honesty has never been higher.
And it’s a big world out there. There’s always room for one more voice, for one more blog. If I’ve learned anything over these past ten years, it’s that echoes from blog posts can reverberate a long time and be heard in surprising places.
Maybe the best time to start a blog was twenty years ago, but the next best time is now.
Do you keep a blog? Or follow one that you love? Please share in the comment section below.
Tuesday, September 10, 2024 • 1 min read
I’m trying out a new note-taking method. I’ve switched from Field Notes to this custom index card holder. I prefer taking notes on index cards, but I’m always misplacing them or can’t find one when I need it. This “book” solves that. I moved the ring to the top right side to accommodate my left-handedness, so it’s comfortable for writing. I take notes on books or writing ideas, and when I’m ready to process or write, I pull out the cards and arrange and rearrange them on my desk. I’ve always loved the tactile and visual creativity of note cards for deeper thinking and structure. And now I don’t have to scan through my notebook scribbles to find all the various notes I’ve taken on a project or a book. So far, so good!
Does anyone else use index cards this way?
From Are Bookstores Just a Waste of Space? (New Yorker):
Two-thirds of the books released by the top-ten trade publishers sell fewer than a thousand copies, and less than four per cent sell more than twenty thousand.
I knew that bestselling authors dominate book sales, but these are humbling statistics for anyone contemplating the Herculean effort of writing and publishing a first book.
Tuesday, April 30, 2024 • 8 min read
This is the second of what might become a series of posts about how I use the Bear app to improve how I leverage notes in my reading and thinking. This is not a topic that will interest many, but writing a blog offers its indulgences. Unless your interests lie in the nerdier aspects of note-taking systems, you can safely skip this one.
If you told me a year ago that I’d write a blog post about the power of Apple widgets, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here I am—writing a blog post about Apple widgets.
You might be asking, what are you even talking about? What are widgets? Apple introduced these quirky appendages in 2020 as a way to present information from apps on the home screen of your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. The most popular widgets provide information about weather, stocks, and news. My reaction back then was decidedly ho-hum. Why would I want to clutter the precious real estate of my iPhone screen when I could just open the app?
A particular kind of widget in Bear 2 finally convinced me of their value.
In January, I switched from Craft to Bear 2 for my reading and knowledge notes. I shared why I chose Bear in this post. The switch went so well that I soon brought over my journal from Day One and my writing from Ulysses. For the past four months, almost everything I’ve written has started and ended in Bear.
I knew that Bear’s implementation of widgets was top-notch. Widgets are an afterthought in Craft, and Obsidian doesn’t offer them at all. What I didn’t understand was that a widget exists in Bear that does something you can’t even do in the app itself: the random note widget.
Before I dive into how important the random widget has become in my notes system, let me explain the problem it solves.
When I first created my connected notes system, I clarified three vital parts of the process: capturing notes and quotes from my reading; curating what I’ve gathered into the system; and compounding the knowledge and insights I’ve gleaned with regular review.
I’ve earned high marks on capture and curation. I’ve had no problem marking passages I like on my Kindle in this digital age. My physical books are filled with margin notes. And I’ve done pretty well organizing all those notes and quotes into stand-alone documents for each book I’ve read. In the Zettelkasten way, I’ve written hundreds of “permanent notes,” which are ideas or knowledge areas I’ve encountered across my reading, linked and cross-linked with other related ideas and books.
But the compounding part of the system, which consists of reviewing my notes and looking for connections and insights I might have missed — arguably the most crucial phase — had lagged. I was reminded of this when I imported my notes from Craft to Bear. I needed to correct some formatting issues, which required inspecting each note individually. There were many notes — far too many — that I hadn’t touched since writing them. What’s the point of taking notes in the first place if you don’t review them?
If you just put notes in all the time and never review them, you’ll have a lot of garbage and hidden notes. You’ll look at your software and realize you don’t use it and abandon it. — Curtis McHale, PKM in Retrospect
An inspiration for a better review process came from my years of using ReadWise. For almost 1,000 mornings, I’ve reviewed a handful of randomly selected passages from the books and articles I’ve read using the ReadWise app on my iPhone or iPad. These bite-sized reviews are a terrific way to remember and connect with quotes that are meaningful to me.
On many mornings, I’ll have an aha! moment from reading a particular passage or the coincidental benefit of seeing these random quotes strung together.
When I discovered the existence of random note widgets, I had another one of those aha! moments. What if I expanded my morning ReadWise sessions to include random book and knowledge notes from Bear?
This is easy to implement in Bear. Here’s a snapshot of my dedicated Bear home screen on my iPad. I have similar screens on my iPhone and Mac.
Bear Home Screen on iPad
The random widgets (circled in red) serve as my morning reminder to review one knowledge note, book note, journal entry, and vocabulary word. Each pulls from a specific tag in Bear. Here’s an example of how this works for a knowledge note in my system:
Knowledge Note Example
Notice the two tags at the bottom of the note. The knowledge tag organizes the note, and the review/wisdom tag serves as a status. I added this by dragging and dropping all my knowledge notes onto the review/wisdom tag in the sidebar. This instant drag-and-drop tag assignment is one of Bear’s superpowers. Any note with this tag will appear in my knowledge review widget.
Here’s the magic of using a separate status tag instead of the note’s organizational tag for the random widget. Once I review the note, I delete the review/wisdom tag to remove it from the pool. This way, I never review the same note twice.
I currently have three hundred knowledge notes and four hundred book notes. It should take a year — more or less — to review each one. This cadence feels right.
I’ve written thousands of journal entries over the past forty years. I use an Apple Shortcut to pull up those I’ve written on this day over my lifetime, an excellent review method I brought to Bear from Day One. Out of those thousands of entries, I’ve tagged about three hundred as particularly insightful. These are the ones I review with my random journal widget. I may decide after a year to revisit these, or I might switch to other journal tags I’ve used in the past: fatherhood, goals, philosophical musings, etc. Keeping the review tag separate from the journal entry’s organizational tag makes these thoughtful rotations possible.
My fourth widget is a flash-card-style vocabulary review for challenging words I’ve identified in my reading.1 I’ve structured the layout of the note so the definition isn’t visible from my Home Screen. I’ve prepended the title with two colons so these notes don’t clutter up my quick-open note searches. While this works great for vocabulary, the idea could be applied to almost any study topic.
Vocabulary Review Notes in Bear
Eventually, the widgets on my home screen will appear blank, meaning I have completed a circuit through the pool of notes in that category. At this point, I’ll restart the process by dragging the current crop of notes to its appropriate review tag. Any new notes I’ve written will be added to the pool, and the virtuous cycle continues.
I’ve tried to inject substance into these morning review sessions beyond mere passive reading. I follow the outbound links. I review the incoming back-links. I prod myself with questions:
Some reviews are quick. Others are more engaging, particularly when I come across a note from an important book I read a while ago but haven’t fully absorbed or implemented. This kind of review is one of the most valuable ways I learn to apply what I’ve read.
Setting up these widgets on my Mac and my devices took some time, but I have come to appreciate the visual reminder on my home screen. Unlike the myriad ways our devices can distract us, here’s an invitation to quietly reflect on the wisdom and lessons I’ve gathered from the writers and thinkers I admire most.
Best of all, I have a sustainable process that avoids the dreaded black hole syndrome that plagues so many well-intended note systems, and it ensures I’m getting the highest rate of return on my reading and thinking.
If you keep your notes in Bear and haven’t explored note reviews with a random widget, give it a try. If you’re not using Bear, what process do you have in place for review? Let me know in the comments below.
After three good years with Craft, I’ve moved my reading notes and PKM to Bear. I really love Bear’s simplicity and hidden power on both Mac and iOS. No futzing, just my words. Blog post: Bear 2 for Writing and Thinking.
Friday, February 23, 2024 • 16 min read
For the past six weeks, I’ve been evaluating an app to replace Craft for my reading notes. This post shares the reasons I’m moving away from Craft and why Bear 2 might be the best app around for writing and thinking on the Mac and iPad.
Craft and the Value of Connected Notes
I use Craft to capture the notes, quotes, and wisdom I’ve gleaned from reading and studying. Before Craft, these notes languished in the margins of books or notecards stuffed in a file box. In three years with Craft, I have written almost four hundred reading notes linked to several hundred dedicated theme notes, creating what is unfortunately called in personal knowledge management circles a “second brain.”
The lofty promises of automatic insights from smart note-taking tools are mostly overblown. I still resort to notecards or a paper notebook when I’m forced to really concentrate. A digital tool does solve the issue of near-instant retrieval, though, and there is goodness in gathering notes together in a trusted system.
So, while Craft may not be self-aware (yet), it has helped me retain and apply more of what I read and let me inch further down the path to wisdom in the process. You can read this earlier post about how I use Craft to help me read better here.
All is not well with Craft, however. Development veered away from its original minimalist design 18 months ago to expand into the lucrative corporate note-taking market. The once pristine interface is now saddled with sharing and collaboration features that aren’t useful to me. With each update, the app gets more complicated to use.
Meanwhile, important shortcomings still need to be addressed. Craft still doesn’t offer a way to use tags to organize notes. Its search function is too dumb to look across blocks of text in a document. Note security lacks encryption or even two-factor authentication. The default font size can’t be increased, straining my tired eyes in the evening. There’s no way to create a backup of my notes database, which seems bonkers. Adding unnecessary insult, the annual subscription cost for Craft just doubled to $96 per year.
Perhaps my biggest issue with Craft is its lack of versatility. In addition to Craft, I keep my journal in Day One and write for others in Ulysses. I tried Craft for all my writing two years ago, but I missed important features and capabilities of these two purpose-built apps, and Craft’s hobbled search function made it very difficult to find anything as the volume of notes increased.
It troubles me to keep silos between my reading notes, my journal, and my public writing when there’s such potential for synergy. Many of the essays on this blog started as entries in my journal. Some were inspired by a book I had read. I am missing out on connections and insights that would be easier to grasp if my writing were centralized in one connected app.
As a result, I’ve been eyeing a new home for my reading notes that might stretch to include my journal and other longer forms of writing. One place for all my words.
A Summer with Obsidian
The obvious choice for most serious note-takers is Obsidian, an app that has exploded in popularity over the past three years. Obsidian is available on most platforms, stores everything in plain text files, takes linking and back-linking to new heights of efficiency and geekiness, and can be customized with a vast array of visual themes and function-adding plugins. Technology bloggers celebrate Obsidian’s ability to easily handle their notes, journaling, and writing.
I spent two months trying out Obsidian as a replacement for Craft last summer. I found the learning curve treacherously steep. For Mac users, the Electron interface is a confusing jumble, reminiscent of my early days with WordPerfect. Persistence and grit are rewarded with a powerful, capable notes app that can do almost anything. Readwise integration works like magic. Obsidian easily handled my 4,000 journal entries from Day One and allowed me to create links between my reading notes and journal without hampering performance or search. Obsidian is continually updated with new features to improve its note-taking capabilities. It truly is a fantastic tool led by a conscientious, values-first team.
I wanted to love Obsidian, and the nerdiest part of me still does. But all that power and customization led to continual tinkering. I experimented endlessly with themes and plugins to perfect my system. I spent hours watching YouTube videos to figure out ways to automate more and more elements of my note-taking. I became proficient with the query programming language of the DataView plugin. Updates to the app and its plugins were frequent but rarely in sync, which resulted in crashes and performance problems that required my attention. The iPad and iPhone apps were slow to open, buggy, and sometimes unusable. Worst of all, I mistook futzing with the app for actual, productive work. I became bedazzled by the technology in the way the hammer shapes the hand. I’m sure at one point or another, I referred to Obsidian as My Precious. In the words of Roland Deschain, I had forgotten the face of my father.
Obsidian may be the perfect app for many, or even most. Just not me. I packed up my notes and returned to Craft.
What’s Important to Me
A weakness in people interested in note-taking apps is the shiny object syndrome. We’re always looking for the next app that will perfect our note-taking system, which is often just procrastination from doing the more challenging work of thinking and writing. I don’t want to be that guy who keeps changing apps or, heaven forbid, only writes about changing apps.
To guide me, I needed to settle on the things that mattered most in a note-taking and writing app:
These criteria helped narrow my selection to just a handful of possibilities. One familiar name kept popping up.
Bear 2
The Bear app has been around for a long time. Its first public beta appeared almost ten years ago, putting it into grandfather status compared to its peers. Bear is developed by Shiny Frog, an “artisanal” software firm that makes just this one app, and only for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
The first version of Bear was released in 2016 and earned critical acclaim for its calming and quirky interface and ability to import and export practically any kind of notes file. I used it to tackle the chore of shuttling my notes between Craft and Obsidian.
After a concerning lull in active development, a modernized version of Bear came out last year. Bear 2 supports note linking, offline access to files, tables, tables of content, footnotes, powerful search, and note encryption. I looked at it briefly when it was first released but moved on when I learned its organizational scheme doesn’t support folders. No folders? What?
I decided I should have another look after reading 300 Times a Day, a gushing blog post about Bear written by a writer I admire. What I discovered surprised me.
Designed for Mac
First, Bear is only available on Mac and iOS devices: no Windows, Android, or even a web client. As a result, Bear is developed by Mac users who understand and leverage every aspect of the hardware and software to make it as intuitive and powerful as possible. This shows itself in myriad ways: swiping gestures on the iPad do what you expect. Intuitive keyboard commands exist for everything. It works like a Mac app.
Bear lets you add widgets to your Home Screen for instant access to a favorite note or the last few notes you edited. Sharing notes between apps is seamless. Bear makes good use of Apple Shortcuts for automating note creation.
Bear also supports the Apple Watch to capture thoughts on the go. I thought this might be a gimmick, but I have used it on walks to record notes on audiobooks that I doubtless would have forgotten otherwise.
Bear note capture on Apple Watch
Hidden Power
Beneath its calming interface lurks a set of power functions that rival and, in some cases, exceed those found in Obsidian. You can search for notes by keyword, tag, special operators, and note creation or modification time. Search results extend to the contents of PDFs and images. On the Mac, you can search and replace text within a note (a feature lacking in Craft).
Images in notes can be cropped, resized, and renamed. Any PDFs you insert show a nice preview (optional) and viewer when opened. On the iPad, annotations of PDFs with the Apple Pencil are easy to make.
Bear’s sync engine relies on Apple’s CloudKit technology. In my short time with Bear, syncing notes between my Mac, iPad, and iPhone has been fast and error-free. All notes are encrypted with Apple’s private keys, meaning Bear has no access to my data. The app can be password protected, and individual notes can be further secured with a password. In contrast, none of my notes in Craft were encrypted or even protected with two-factor authentication. A Craft employee or ambitious hacker could read all my notes. In Obsidian, notes are stored as a simple folder of text files, available to anyone with physical access to my computer. To me, Bear feels like the most secure of the bunch.
You can create a complete backup of your Bear notes. It might seem basic, but this was one of my sore spots with Craft that failed to offer any way to back my system other than a raw markdown export of notes.
Import and export functions are truly world-class. Built-in importers exist for Day One, Obsidian, Evernote, TextBundle, and folders of Markdown files. You can export to TextBundle and Markdown as well. If you have PDFs and images in an Obsidian vault, Bear is one of the only apps I know that can import these without breaking attachment links. Documents can be shared in PDF, HTML, RTF, DOCX, and ePub formats.
I imported my Day One journal into Bear as a test of performance. Importing 4,000 journal entries and over 1,000 images and PDFs took under three minutes. Tags from Day One came over flawlessly. Searching those journal entries was lightning fast, and I successfully retrieved entries where the search term was embedded inside a PDF.
Each note has an information panel that displays writing statistics like word count and reading time, a table of contents, and back-links. Back-links are presented in alphabetical order and can optionally show unlinked mentions. A keyboard shortcut toggles these screens on and off. The Mac version allows you to drag the panel to the side so it stays open as you navigate your notes for reference.
Bear has the most powerful web capture of any tool I’ve used, including DevonThink. Share a web page with Bear, and it will convert it to a very presentable note, images and all. I couldn’t do that with Craft or Obsidian.
Exquisite Writing
What I like best about Bear is how it encourages thoughtful, distraction-free writing. The typography is exquisite. You can change the default font, font size, margins, line, and paragraph spacing. Pro customers can choose from 28 built-in themes, but the default, in my eyes, is perfect. With a keyboard shortcut or a quick swipe with your finger, everything disappears but your words.
Markdown symbols are hidden (if you want), and keyboard commands produce all the formatting if you prefer to not type the symbols. You can add footnotes, tables, images, external links, bullet and numbered lists, and quoted passages from a tool palette that pops up as you need it.
Tags
Bear’s organization scheme relies on tags, not folders. This was initially difficult for me to wrap my brain around. I’ve been using folders to store computer stuff for decades. Yet the implementation of tags in Bear is intuitive and powerful. The tags from my Day One journal populated in Bear, and I could nest these under a parent tag called journal by just editing the tag name. Hundreds of notes were updated with the new nested tag name in a couple of keystrokes. In short order, I recreated my folder system from Craft as nested tags in Bear. Tags offer the added benefit of allowing notes to appear in more than one place in your system simply by adding a tag. Working with tags these last six weeks, I no longer see the need for folders, which I guess is what Bear is getting at with their tags-only organization.
Here’s a high-level view of my tags in Bear. You can select custom icons for each, some of which are initially set based on the tag name. Check out what Bear suggested for my “drafts” tag nested under Writing. Only a Mac developer would pay this level of attention to detail and poke fun at the same time.
Tags and screen layout on the Mac in Bear 2
Cost
The pricing for Bear 2 is simple and fair. $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year for all its Pro features. Bear offers a free seven-day free trial.
A Wish List
There are a few areas where Bear falls behind Craft and/or Obsidian that do matter to me.
My list of desires for Bear will be shorter than others interested in document collaboration or using platforms other than Mac and iOS. Bear is working on a web version, which might satisfy some, but honestly, if you’re looking for collaboration or different platforms, Craft is still a great choice. Obsidian is hard to beat if multiple platforms, automation, and customization are essential.
Craft, Obsidian, and Bear — My Scorecard
Features | Craft | Obsidian | Bear |
Intuitive Design | 8 | 4 | 9 |
Note Linking | 9 | 9 | 7 |
Mobile Experience | 8 | 5 | 9 |
Performance/Stability | 7 | 9 | 9 |
Search | 5 | 10 | 10 |
Versatility | 6 | 9 | 9 |
Future Proof | 7 | 9 | 9 |
Security / Backups | 3 | 8 | 9 |
Cost | 6 | 8 | 10 |
Overall | 6.6 | 7.9 | 9.0 |
Scorecard notes:
Is Bear the one?
I’ve put Bear through its paces these last six weeks. I wrote a half dozen literature notes, over forty journal entries, and four blog posts. I expected Bear’s charm to wear off a little, but the joy is real. I am a little startled at how taken I am with the app.
Still, I understand Bear isn’t for everyone. It’s only available within the Apple ecosystem, lacks collaboration or web access, and can’t be customized or extended with plug-ins. It doesn’t even offer a way to organize your notes with folders. These are deal killers for most.
Steve Jobs believed that “innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things,” so you can focus all your energy on doing one thing incredibly well. The Bear team at Shiny Frog must subscribe to this view. They’ve brought a laser-like focus to making an elegant, powerful writing and notes app for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. For some lucky minority, Bear represents note-taking nirvana, an app closer in spirit to old-school typewriters and handwritten journals than typical feature-bloated software. An app that disappears into the background, letting you zero in on the most essential thing: your words.
It’s clear that Bear can handily replace Craft as my note-taking app. I didn’t expect that Bear could so easily supplant Day One for journaling and Ulysses for writing. These are amazing, purpose-built apps that I’ve enjoyed for years. There are features I’d miss: “On this Day” reflections, journal suggestions and prompts in Day One; WordPress publication and manual sheet reordering in Ulysses. Yet, the power of having all my writing in one connected and comfortable place feels tantalizingly near.
Bear might just become my only digital tool for writing and thinking.
Questions or thoughts about Bear, Craft, or Obsidian? Leave a note in the comment section below.
Friday, January 19, 2024 • 7 min read
I surprised myself a little over a year ago by writing in a paper journal every morning. The surprise wasn’t that I was keeping a journal but that I was doing it by hand. I had been using the Day One journaling app to record my private thoughts for over a decade. But this was no ordinary year. After suffering an immeasurable loss, I yearned for the comfort that sometimes only flows from pen and paper.
Yet what’s even more surprising is that this was no momentary whim. I’ve kept up this daily habit of scribbling in a notebook in the morning and typing in Day One at night for over a year now. And I think I’ve pieced together why, for me, the combination of analog and digital writing has developed into the best possible journaling experience.
Keeping a journal promotes mindfulness, reduces stress and anxiety, improves memory, and can enhance creativity. Journaling can also help you heal from profound loss, providing solace, catharsis, and a means to explore feelings that might otherwise get suppressed. When my son was killed in a motorcycle accident a little over a year ago, I turned to my journal as a way to process my grief.
I am not new to journaling. I’ve kept a private journal for more than thirty years. I filled a dozen notebooks before switching over to Day One in 2012. My journal holds almost four thousand entries dating back as far as 1982.1 I haven’t missed a night of journaling in almost a thousand days.
Despite my appreciation for digital efficiency, I’ve always carried a Field Notes notebook in the back pocket of my jeans or my bag. I like the feel of a pen in my hand when I’m thinking. When we moved to Arizona last year, I knew we wouldn’t be traveling as much as we did aboard our trawler. I decided to upgrade to a full-size desk journal for a change of pace. As one does, I scoured the internet for a suitable notebook.2
I chose the B5 Journal Pro from Scribbles That Matter, which is roughly the size of an iPad, though much thicker. The notebook paper is numbered, dotted, and thick enough to feel luxurious and sturdy with no bleed-through (the paper is rated at 120 gsm). There are two placeholder ribbons, several index pages, and a tucked-in folder in the back of the book for storing notecards or loose paper. When you open the notebook, you hear that satisfying crack of the binding. The book lays flat on a desk.3 The cover is made from vegan leather and feels terrific. This is undoubtedly the nicest journal I’ve ever owned.
I didn’t know how I would use the notebook at first, but a pattern soon emerged. I reached for it as I sipped my first cup of coffee in the morning while my mind was fresh and any dreams still lingered. I would write a half page of fragments, lists, how I slept, and stray thoughts that were top of mind. Sometimes, my pen would linger over the page for minutes, my mind in a meditative trance. Other times, the words that escaped my pen surprised me, like a possessed Ouija board. Later in the day or evening, I might write a little more about the book I was reading or capture a quote I had heard, but most of the action this notebook saw was during that first cup of morning coffee.
I wrote more honestly and sincerely about the loss I had suffered than I did at the keyboard. Slowly, over days and weeks, the pages filled and overflowed with feelings my stoic heart couldn’t express in front of a blinking cursor.
After several months of morning writing, I marveled over how connected I had become to this notebook. Would-be journal keepers who give up too soon miss out on the magic of a journal filled with 50 or more pages of their musings. Flipping back through prior days and weeks of writing reveals the mosaic of meaning you missed because you were standing too near. These cryptic clues drawn from your subconscious remain invisible until you turn the pages just right and suddenly glimpse the pattern. The invitation to revisit what you wrote yesterday or last month prompts you to probe deeper into the crux of what’s troubling you.
And yet, as much as I enjoy this handwritten journal, I still use Day One in the evenings. The two journals flow from different parts of my brain, though they work together in an interesting way.
At a keyboard, I write in complete sentences in my practiced journal voice. I am articulate. I write to understand, yes, but also to communicate with some future version of myself, or potentially others. All my published essays began as one of these nightly journal entries. The handwritten notebook is focused squarely on the present moment; the writing in Day One leans back and tilts forward. One is meditation; the other is memoir.
During the time I’ve kept the handwritten journal, the quality of my writing in Day One feels richer. Fragmentary scribbles in the morning often blossom after a day of rumination, elongating into full sentences and paragraphs. A vague concept at daybreak might give birth to the start of an essay that night or maybe a few days or weeks later. There is a give-and-take between these two journals that I’ve come to appreciate.
And besides, Day One isn’t going anywhere. With thousands of entries spanning three decades of my life, the app holds tremendous value for me. I search it often to track down events, trips, critical milestones in my life. The memories I’ve captured of my son stand out like beacons of light on my darker days. Writing each night in Day One is a ritual that helps settle my mind and bring closure to the day.
I completed the final page of my paper journal on the last day of 2023. I realized this potentiality in the middle of December and managed my writing output to coincide with this tidy conclusion. Filling one of these journals each calendar year feels right.
After so many years of digital journaling, I forgot what it felt like to retire one. I had grown quite attached to this old journal with its hundreds of pages of private thoughts. After a year of daily use, the book held up surprisingly well. No loose pages, and the binding is still tight. Before shelving it in its lovely slipcase alongside my other paper journals, I archived a PDF copy with the scanner app on my iPhone for safekeeping.
I am slowly breaking in the new notebook, an identical twin to its predecessor. I miss paging through past entries before I start to write in the morning. But, perhaps it’s a good reminder to celebrate new beginnings and the ever-changing nature of life, to close the book on a year of sorrow. I am not healed. There is no healing from some losses. But, at least I can measure the distance I have traveled through the pages of my two journals.
Do you keep a journal? Do you use an app, or do you write by hand? Or both? I’d love to hear about your experiences with journaling in the comments below.
Monday, October 16, 2023 • 4 min read
How I fell into a trance with the Indy blog service, Micro.blog, is a curious story.
I received a renewal invoice from HostGator notifying me that the cost of my bi-annual web hosting service was going up 58%. Quick math informed me that I was paying too much for a personal blog. Surely there must be a less expensive alternative? That question led me down many paths, most leading me in circles.
Moving to Wordpress.com seemed like a good idea until I realized its plug-in-enabled service made even HostGator’s renewal price seem like a steal. I considered Medium and Substack, but their continual pestering readers to subscribe to their respective services didn't mesh with my belief in the value of an open internet. Many other competing web hosting services offered attractive short-term teaser rates but would require constant leapfrogging from service to service to remain affordable.
One service — Micro.blog — caught my attention briefly. $5 a month for hosting your blog with your own domain, a federated service that automated cross-posting to all sorts of other sites, and a blogging platform that allowed you to publish both long essays and short tweet-like updates to a timeline with no ads and no algorithms. No spam, no trolls. No fake news. Just old-fashioned blogging.
As I dug deeper for alternatives, I was reminded that HostGator not only supplied my personal blog but also housed my boat blog, our family website, their respective registered domains, and, importantly, email accounts for my entire family. Canceling HostGator would be a considerable disruption. Moving to a competing hosting service would be a chore—a big one.
After a week of researching my website options, I called HostGator about the price increase. The call took five minutes of mild negotiating. By the time I hung up, they had reduced the increase by two-thirds. It was still going up 17%, but given the cost of other services and the work involved in switching, I felt I was getting a bargain. I would keep my blog on WordPress with HostGator for another two years.
But, I kept thinking about Micro.blog.
Like many, I've grown distrustful of the big social media sites. I have accounts on most, but I rarely look at them or post to them. An impersonator tried to take over my Instagram account a few weeks ago. My Twitter (X?!) feed is filled with all sorts of craziness. What happened to human civility? Facebook is all ads, and God help me if I click on any of them. When a service is free, you and your posts are the product. That's Business 101. I know there is still a lot of good on these sites, but it’s buried so deep that slogging through it fills me with despair. With all the heady promises that technology would bring us closer together, how did we end up here?
Maybe, I mused, I still needed Micro.blog after all. What if, alongside my longer posts on my regular blog, I shared the updates on Micro.blog that I used to post on social media? I kept thinking: no ads and no algorithms. No spam, no trolls, no likes, no push for followers, no sensational posts designed to go viral. Nothing goes viral on Micro.blog, so there's no need to push fake news—just honest thoughts, pictures, and videos amidst a community of like-minded creators.
What ultimately convinced me to sign up with Micro.blog was learning about its founder, Manton Reece (@manton). I read his blog posts about the purpose of Micro.blog. I perused his manifesto on Indie Microblogging. I watched a few videos of him being interviewed, looking to me like a young Steve Jobs, clearly brilliant, explaining the social good of the service and how he and his team are trying to make the world a better place through this technology. His scorn for traditional social media is palpable. I liked him at once. He's one of the good guys. You can tell. How could I not support this cause?
So, I have joined Micro.blog (@robertbreen). You can follow me there by clicking the menu link at the top of my home page at robertbreen.com, or you can see a summary of my latest updates on the right sidebar on most of the pages on my website. Essays and longer posts will still appear here on the regular blog. Shorter posts and updates on my travels, the books I'm reading, and the daily happenings in my life will hit Micro.blog. I hope you'll have a look. And who knows? You might be the next to fall under the curious trance of Micro.blog and its mission to save blogging.
Saturday, February 26, 2022 • 12 min read
I’ve kept a journal for most of my adult life. I got started in my early twenties filling dozens of blank journal books. Ten years ago, I went digital with an app called Day One, and I have been using an iPad to journal since then. My journal holds thousands of entries — over a million words — spanning more than thirty years of private thoughts and memories.
Day One is my most consistently used app for the past decade. The app provides a calming, distraction-free writing interface and an end-to-end encrypted syncing service that keeps my writing secure but available on all my devices. It handles photos beautifully, accepts audio and video entries, automatically captures metadata about your writing environment like location and weather, and links automatically with Instagram. Journal templates, writing prompts, and the “On This Day” personal history review round out an incredible journaling experience. I enjoyed it so much that I even took the time a few years ago to type in my old paper journals to have a complete digital record of my life’s musings.
And yet, I’ve had this nagging idea that I should give up on Day One and start using Craft as my daily journal software.
Why would I leave Day One?
On the surface, I’ve wondered if I needed anything more than a basic writing app for my journal. After all, I wrote for years and years with just pen and paper. Did I need a dedicated app with another paid subscription?
Yet, my true interest is more profound than saving money or mere simplification. It’s widely known that to write well; you have to read. There’s no better on-the-job training for an aspiring author than to read the works of other writers. It’s less commonly understood how many writers keep a private journal and, more importantly, how they leverage their private missives as inspiration for their published works. Henry David Thoreau, Joan Didion, and Susan Sontag were avid journalers who attributed at least part of their success to keeping a diary. David Sedaris and Joyce Carol Oates both consider their private journals to be critical parts of their writing process. Ralph Waldo Emerson filled nearly two hundred journal volumes over his lifetime, which he frequently consulted as source material for his essays and speeches. He spent months cataloging his journals to make access easier.
A reason I’ve maintained a journal for so many years stems from a deeply-held desire to become a published author. My earliest journal entries make this point again and again. When I root out the source of my few published pieces, each can be traced back to its origin in my journal.
As much as I love Day One, Craft has stolen my heart as an innovative note-taking and writing app that I’ve used for a little over a year as my knowledge management system. Modeled after Professor Luhmann’s Zettelkasten system, I use Craft to house about a thousand interconnected notes and insights from books I’ve read. The power of connecting reading notes through a system of links and backlinks is truly astonishing once you open your mind to the possibilities. I’ve shared how I use Craft to leverage what I read, and it’s this versatile linking capability that has drawn me to use it for my private journal.
What if, like Emerson, I took steps to make my journals easier to access when I’m writing for others? What if I brought together my journal writing and reading notes into the same cross-linked system? Would the organic connections I’ve discovered from my reading grow deeper through close association with thirty years of journals? Could swirling together my journal writing and book notes in a system like Craft make me a better, more productive writer?
Might the convenience of having all my writing in one place, fueled by the connecting power of links and backlinks, outweigh the benefits of a dedicated journaling app?
To answer these questions, I launched an experiment: I kept my daily journal in Craft for an entire month to see whether or not these private musings would infuse greater insights into my Zettelkasten system and, ultimately, better writing.
As part of the experiment, I imported 3,200 journal entries into Craft to test its search and linking capabilities (see the end of this post if you’re interested in learning how to export Day One to Craft). I initially expected to use Craft’s Daily Notes function but soon decided against that. The implementation of daily notes in Craft felt half-baked and disconnected from the central note-taking system. Instead, I created a “Journal” folder in the main Craft notes area, alongside my reading and permanent notes.
Here’s what I learned after thirty consecutive days of journal writing in Craft:
I was concerned that Craft might lose its pep with several thousand journal entries spanning more than a million words added to its data banks, yet performance remained snappy. Search results were near-instantaneous, and syncing updates between the Mac and iPad were as fast as ever.
Craft’s syncing system does not provide end-to-end encryption like Day One. I wasn’t very concerned about security or encryption for my reading notes. But my private journal? That’s a different story. In the end, I decided to accept the security risk for the promise of new insights and writing productivity garnered by a connected journal.
I found the writing experience in Craft to be mostly pleasing. I hid the navigation sidebar with a keyboard command (CMD-) to provide a clean, distraction-free writing environment. Numbered lists, bullet lists, pictures, and even Apple Pencil drawings were easy to add. I enjoyed moving entire paragraphs around in my entry with just my index finger. But, there were some annoyances. Craft doesn’t permit a change to its default font or font size. I usually write in my journal before bed. In Day One, I scale up the font to make it easier on my tired eyes. In Craft, I found myself straining a bit when I wrote at the end of the day, wishing I could make that font a little easier to see. And while I generally don’t spend too much time editing my journal writing, I found Craft’s Undo capability tedious. While Day One will quickly erase an entire sentence with just a couple of CTL-Z commands, Craft insists on undoing each character, one by one, even to the point of redoing and undoing typos. It’s a small thing, but enough to pull me out of the writing trance when it happened, and something that more mature writing apps handle better. But, these are minor complaints. The overall writing experience in Craft was positive.
With my journal now part of Craft, I could finally sift through decades of personal writing for insights to link to my knowledge system. Yet, I soon discovered that searching Craft with all those journal entries had limitations. Before this, a CMD-O search in Craft usually produced interesting and relevant results. Now with thousands of rambling journal entries thrown in, a search wasn’t as reliable or valuable. For instance, a CMD-O search in Craft for the word fatherhood produced a list of 30 randomly ordered documents. The same search in Day One found 65 entries, ordered properly by date. I learned Craft enforces a hard limit of 30 documents using this on-the-fly search method, though it’s unclear how it decides which to present. Craft’s dedicated search pane found all 65 fatherhood journal entries, but reviewing the search results was cumbersome. The journal entries were again presented in a random order, and the scroll bar persistently leaped back to the top of the list when I clicked on an entry, losing my place. This made a review of a long list of search results very challenging.
Further, Craft’s search functionality is ham-stringed by its reliance on text blocks. For example, If you search for a journal entry with the words fatherhood and marriage, Craft will only find documents where the words appear in the same paragraph. If the search words appear in different paragraphs of the same document, Craft won’t find it. Day One had no such limitation.
Dates are the universal building blocks of every journal. Since Craft is primarily a note-taking app, it doesn’t provide much context on the date something is added to the system. This can make finding entries for a particular day, week, or month more challenging. I partially solved this by appending the date to the journal entry’s title, so I can at least view the date as I scroll through a list of entries. But, there’s no easy way to zoom to a particular time period in Craft like you can with Day One.
Connecting thoughts through the power of two-way links was one of the main reasons I wanted to try Craft as a journaling tool. Surprisingly, I struggled to apply links when I journaled, and when I did, they served as a work-around to apply a tag vs. a legitimate link. This troubled me since creating these links comes so easily when I’m writing and curating reading notes. It seems my mental mode when I write in my journal doesn’t lend itself to self-editing or analytical reasoning. I must journal from a whole different side of my brain, favoring feelings, vague intuitions and dreams over links and connections and knowledge building. The writing fizzled any time I stopped to scan for potential links as I journaled. This happened again and again.
After a month of journal writing in Craft, I realized the truth. My journal isn’t meant to be poked or prodded, linked, or back-linked. For me, the act of writing every day in a journal is therapy; writing how I feel in the moment keeps me healthy and balanced. My attempt to elevate the process in Craft only diminished the meditative value of the journal writing, while producing little in the way of new connected insights. Not only that, but my system of carefully curated wisdom in Craft felt swamped by a tidal wave of mostly unremarkable and repeated personal observations, which obscured much more than it uncovered.
Before importing my journals, everything in Craft had been vetted and polished to contribute to my understanding of the world and what it means to be human. The source of these insights was gleaned from other writers’ books, but each note was carefully distilled and refined in a personal way that is meaningful to me. While my journals are comprised of all my own words and heart-felt reflections, they’re raw and meandering and filled with empty calories, which simply aren’t suitable for the wisdom I collect inside Craft.
So, my journaling experiment ended with a return to Day One, keeping Craft apart and sanctified as my knowledge system.
Back in Day One, I felt a new appreciation for the soft, cozy feeling the app offers the constant journaler: the writing prompt that stirs your imagination as you open the app; the time travel of reading your past “On This Day” entries that transports you back ten, twenty, even thirty years ago; the comfort and security of end to end encryption of my most private thoughts; the easy swiping through the past week’s entries to connect you to the story arc of your life; and maybe most important: that precious altered state you enter as you write for just yourself without any expectations or demands … but honesty.
This experiment may not have resulted in any new Emersonian journal insights, but it did ultimately lead me to a better way to leverage my journal writing in Craft. As part of my weekly review, I now take some quiet time with the analytical side of my brain to reread the previous week’s journal entries for insights and ideas that add something meaningful to my knowledge system in Craft. It’s the perfect way to maintain the therapy of my journal process while leveraging the best of my thinking in Craft. And since my lifetime of journal writing resides digitally in Day One, I’m just a couple clicks away from discovering those lost insights lurking inside this vault of my life’s experiences and musings.
Here are the steps I took to export over 3,200 Day One journal entries and 700 embedded photos to Craft. I used the Bear and Hazel apps to help me in the process.
Wednesday, December 15, 2021 • 10 min read
It’s been a year since I adopted Craft as my primary research and note-taking app. I shared my impressions of Craft early on, but I thought I would provide an update on how I’m using the software and why, with all the other choices available in the personal knowledge management (PKM) space, I’m still all-in with Craft.
I use Craft as a Zettelkasten-style note-taking system fed by a healthy reading habit. I take notes on things that interest me so that I might use this knowledge to make better decisions and inform my own writing. Before Craft, these notes were scattered across note cards, journals, and the margins of books — locked away and seldom consulted. I had this uneasy feeling that I was wasting my time taking notes at all. But no longer. Over the year, the notes I created inside Craft have taken on a life of their own, approaching that mythic “second brain” potential. It took a while to reach critical mass, but I find that the time I spend — writing notes, linking notes, and exploring connections — now yields some of my most thoughtful and creative work.
So, yeah: I love Craft. The designers have created and continue to evolve an iPad-first thinking tool that enables me to focus on my ideas and connected thoughts without unnecessary complexity or clutter. It matches my sense of design sensibilities and interface delight; it works the way I think. With the announcement of Craft 2.0 and Craft X, I am more excited than ever about the future of this fantastic app.
In part, my enthusiasm for Craft stems from a short dalliance with Obsidian, another popular PKM app. I spent a few weeks in this alternate note-taking universe when ReadWise released its official plug-in for Obsidian. ReadWise is a service that gathers and resurfaces highlights and annotations from books and periodicals, scratching a particular itch for serious readers. Obsidian has won over many fans with its powerful linking tools on top of plain text files, and this new superpower of syncing ReadWise highlights automatically was too tempting not to try out. I soon learned that Obsidian wouldn’t work for me, and despite the automation with ReadWise, I hurried back to my beloved Craft. But in the process, I learned what matters most to me in using these knowledge and thinking tools that I thought would be useful to share with others who might be thinking about diving into the PKM world.
Craft is beautiful, drawing praise from just about everyone who tries it. The text spacing, the font choice, the intuitive user interface, the colors, and even the app icon options point to a gifted visionary with an intense focus on a near-perfect balance of form and function. Craft reminds me of the best of Apple’s hardware and software designs. But this beauty goes beyond appearance. Dragging a block or a note somewhere in the app (or outside of it) does exactly what you expect it should. Markdown text commands fly from my fingers and transform before my eyes into perfectly formatted text — no arcane symbols or HTML code to disrupt my thinking, no toggle between edit and preview mode to confuse me. My notes appear consistently polished, not janky with placeholder brackets, caret symbols, or exclamation marks. Sync is flawless. Intuitive keyboard shortcuts and slash commands keep my hands on the keyboard and my thoughts flowing without having to think; now, how again do you link to a block in another note? With other apps and Obsidian, in particular, the design and user interface feel like glaring distractions that interrupt flow. With Craft, everything on screen is there for a good purpose, nothing more. The interface fades into the background as I work, precisely what I want in a thinking tool like this.
Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
— Steve Jobs 1
Since I use an iPad Pro for almost all my work, I need a platform without mobile compromises. Craft was designed for iPad first, and it truly feels that way with no limits in functionality or power. It actually took longer for the Mac app to gain all the iPad features, which is backward from most developed software (Craft’s Mac app just won Apple’s 2021 software of the year award, so I guess it caught up!).
In contrast, Obsidian’s mobile offerings launched late and are still hobbled by functionality gaps and far too many compromises for power use. During my time with Obsidian, I frequently pulled out my old MacBook Pro to do things, which felt jarring in my iPad-centric world.
Craft includes excellent sharing options to other formats: a nicely formatted email, PDF, Microsoft Word, Markdown, and Textbundle, which allows a complete export of your database to other apps like Bear or Obsidian. In addition, notes can be shared between apps like Ulysses, Day One, DevonThink, and Things. Craft allows seamless drag and drop between apps. On the iPad, I often have Ulysses and Craft open in split-screen mode to review my notes and drag over blocks of text to incorporate as I write. Inserting an image into a note from Photos or the web works equally well. It interacts with these other apps in a consistent, predictable way, allowing me to focus on the content. I can share notes with colleagues through a secret link or even publish whole sections of my notes to the web, rendered with all the style and interactivity of the app itself.
In the past six months, Craft released an astounding 25 updates to the app. New features include a calendar function, integrated daily notes, tables, inline equations, local file storage, expanded app customization preferences, image and PDF annotation, Shortcuts functionality, Markdown export improvements, and significant app performance boosts. Perhaps the most exciting innovation is still to come with Craft X, an open-source plug-in platform that developers can use to create custom functionality within Craft. A ReadWise plug-in is already in testing, and the roadmap suggests we might see features like WordPress publishing, automated templates, and other workflow automation soon. The pace of innovation at Craft is astonishing.
Company stability and sustainability are factors to consider before investing time and money in a product or service. Craft and Obsidian are roughly the same age, so comparing their business strategy for growth is instructive. Craft avoided the freemium model and enforced a subscription fee from the beginning, followed by a sizable round of venture capital to expand the team and fund product development. Between this recurring subscription revenue and the capital raise, cash flow should not be a top concern at Craft. In contrast, Obsidian relies on its two founders for software development and capital. The vast majority of users pay nothing for Obsidian, which puts pressure on the long-term sustainability of the business. Obsidian recently doubled the rates for their optional syncing and publishing services to improve cash flow. Everything else being equal, I would bet on the company with a sustainable business model, capital, and that financial metric that eludes so many startups: positive cash flow.
One of the raps against Craft is its proprietary database, where it stores your notes. This database structure enables all of the amazing functionality and power of the app, but should Craft go out of business, all your information could technically vanish. In contrast, Obsidian stores your notes locally in plain text, which should always be accessible in the future. I’ve lost access to my share of old word-processing documents due to unsupported file formats, so I had a chance to test Craft’s export capabilities when I moved my notes to Obsidian and back again. The results surprised me.
Craft to Obsidian. The steps to export your Craft data really couldn’t be more straightforward. Select all your notes and use the export to Markdown function. This creates a nested folder of all your notes in Markdown text format alongside images, PDFs, or other files stored in Craft. Next, open the folder as a vault in Obsidian. That’s it. Your folder structure from Craft carries over to Obsidian. The links between documents, even links to specific blocks within a document, come through perfectly. The export of 2,000 notes took under a minute.
Obsidian to Craft. The process of getting my notes back out of Obsidian was surprisingly tricky. While notes in Obsidian are simple Markdown text files, maintaining the critical links between note files, images, and other embedded files is complicated without a proper export function (which Obsidian lacks). Thanks to a tip from Curtis McHale, I used Bear, a competing notes app, to import my notes from Obsidian. Since Bear doesn’t recognize folders, I had to consolidate all my notes from a dozen folders in Obsidian to one catch-all folder to avoid losing links. Bear was able to import all my notes, complete with links between notes, images, and PDFs, and then export them in a format that worked fine for Craft. Once in Craft, I had to refile all my notes back into my folder scheme, which took some time. For software that touts itself as the ultimate in future-proofing, I honestly didn’t expect it would be such a hassle to move my information back to Craft. Bear gets high marks here for serving as the go-between, but it seems like a pretty big gap for Obsidian not to have a proper export function.
Despite the time it took to retrieve my files from Obsidian, I discovered how easy it was to export my information from Craft, which isn’t something you usually figure out until it becomes a critical necessity. I now have very little hesitation with trusting my notes to the Craft with its top-notch export capabilities.
I am sold on Craft as my knowledge tool, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect or necessarily suitable for everyone. Obsidian is popular for good reason. It’s free for most users and available on more platforms, like Windows and Android. Secure encryption of your notes is possible with its optional sync service. It provides more powerful back-link capabilities and unlinked mentions, and a graph view of your linked notes that doesn’t exist in Craft. While the Obsidian interface doesn’t appeal to me, direct manipulation of Markdown and HTML code is the preferred way to write and think for many, particularly programmers. And, because it’s so easy to export my Craft data, I’m keeping Obsidian around for times when I want to dig deeper into unlinked mentions or mine insights from the notes graph.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear cautions about confusing motion with action when getting things done. Motion represents all those things we do before getting down to work. Thinking about it, planning, organizing your desk, making lists, selecting tools, etc. Action is doing the work itself. Since the work is often difficult and draining, it’s tempting to slip into the trap of motion, and switching software tools, like my two-week foray with Obsidian, is the very epitome of motion.
So, my advice is to pick a tool that feels right to you and stick with it. After all, the real value of these tools stems from the thoughts and connections you bring to it, which takes time and critical mass to yield any lasting benefits. After my year with Craft, it feels like we’re both just getting started.
Questions about Craft? Leave a note in the comment section below.
Saturday, October 23, 2021 • 3 min read
I’m a long-time subscriber of Grammarly, the subscription-based grammar checking and proofreading service. I’m the kind of writer that needs grammar and style checking. No matter how many times I review a draft, the round trip through Grammarly finds some sort of error. It’s tough to proofread your own writing, and incorporating this final check in my process has saved me from some otherwise mortifying bloopers. The cost of a premium Grammarly subscription feels low when compared to publishing articles with these dumb writing errors.
I use the writing app Ulysses for all my published writing. I love its distraction-free environment and its ability to publish directly to WordPress. Last year, Ulysses introduced a solid grammar and style checking tool of its own called Revision Mode. It’s a powerful proofreading tool, and I appreciate how convenient it is to check my text without leaving the app. But, at least for me, it’s not as comprehensive in its error-checking capabilities as Grammarly. When it was first released, I corrected drafts of my writing first in Ulysses with a follow-up check in Grammarly. Grammarly would always find additional mistakes that Ulysses missed. In addition, Grammarly points out wordy or unclear sentences and offers up alternative wording suggestions that are usually pretty good.
Grammarly doesn’t support the Markdown file format that Ulysses uses, so checking the text of a Ulysses document is done by copying and pasting between the apps. The problem with this approach is that any links to external sites get lost in this round-trip process.
I encountered this glitch recently after I publishing a blog post with a bunch of links to other websites. The links in the post-Grammarly document retained the appearance of a proper link with its blue underlined font, but clicking on any of them in the published article took you nowhere. The embedded link instructions were wiped clean. I had to hastily edit and republish the post once I discovered the error.
After this snafu, I contacted the support team at Ulysses and received the following guidance on how to send drafts to Grammarly and back without losing any data. I’m sharing here in case others might benefit from these instructions:
How to Preserve Links in the Round Trip between Ulysses and Grammarly:
When you copy text from Ulysses to Grammarly, perform a right-click › Copy as › Markdown. When you are done in Grammarly, copy the text there as would normally do, but then in Ulysses, right-click again › Paste from › Markdown (not Paste as...). Doing so will preserve any Markdown links in your Ulysses document.
I’ve tested this on both the Mac and iPad versions of Ulysses, and it works perfectly.
Friday, September 24, 2021 • 5 min read
For the past ten years, I have been on a mission to eradicate paper from my work and home life. I can now access information more quickly and from anywhere, whether at sea or at the Apple Store where I need to produce the invoice for a dead MacBook Pro. And yet, one hold-out refuses to go gently into that dark night of paper annihilation: my Field Notes notebooks. These pint-sized memo books with their quirky designs and durable paper still travel with me just about everywhere. I sometimes wonder at the irony of using a $1,000 iPad Pro as a lap desk to scribble in a $4 notebook.
With everything else in my life so digitally focused, why do I still fill one of these 48-page Field Notes every three or four weeks?
This morning, I pulled out a year’s worth of tattered notebooks to see if I could solve this mystery. To be honest, I was apprehensive at looking too closely. Part of me wanted to leave well enough alone and not probe, perhaps fearing that I would find a bunch of meaningless jibber-jabber and force myself to give up these little books that I love so much. With some trepidation then, I skimmed the scribbles, diagrams, lists, weird dreams, single underlined words, whole paragraphs of intense, slanted scrawl, arrows, and lots of scratched-out words. Each notebook told a confused story about my state of mind at the time: hopes and worries, looming decisions, crazy, half-baked ideas, and incomplete solutions to problems that troubled me. As I flipped the pages, I watched meandering thoughts morph and solidify under the pressure of continued probing and analysis.
Give me a small canvas of blank paper and a pen, and I can slip into a deeper mental state than I seem to achieve in front of a blinking cursor. After a few minutes of doodles, I may even open a tiny crack into my subconscious. The physical act of handwriting may provide a familiar comfort that allows my mind to settle and focus. Perhaps it’s the simplicity of the interface: no buttons, no battery to charge, just me and my ill-formed thoughts. Maybe the old leather cover I use to carry the notebook and pen, scuffed and softened over many years of use, sends a chemical signal through my fingertips to open, to relent.
Psychologists have shown that writing things down on paper helps you remember better. The folks at Field Notes understand this:
Jamie Rubin, a writer and technology enthusiast, recently returned to notecards for his reading notes after struggling to reap the benefits he expected from keeping these inside Obsidian. I store my reading notes in Craft but have encountered few of the promised eureka moments since adopting this Zettelkasten technique of hyper-linked notes. While I appreciate the ability to retrieve and update these notes quickly, I don’t seem to be able to think as clearly (or as abstractly) within an app like Craft as I do on paper.
In one of Nabokov’s lectures on literature 1, he defines memory as one of the four key attributes of a good reader (or thinker). Whether you remember things by writing them down or searching your Obsidian vault might be a wash. He calls having a nearby dictionary the second important attribute. Here, I tip my hat to the internet. How satisfying it is to tap an unknown word on the screen of a Kindle with my finger, and as if by magic, a well-crafted definition (or translation, or Wikipedia page) appears without leaving my place in the text. But, it’s his final two attributes of a good reader, that of having an active imagination and some artistic sense, that strike me as the hardest to achieve digitally. Artistry and imagination are still the dominion of pad and paper.
When I’m stuck on something, I instinctively reach for my little notebook — not my iPad. And while what I capture is often raw and disjointed, I review these notes every morning over coffee, checking in with my subconscious, allowing fragments to inch together as if by magnetic pull. It might take days or even weeks of scribbles and circled words to reach true clarity of thought.
When Jimmy Buffett has an idea for a song — sometimes just a phrase — he writes it down on any available scrap of paper and stuffs it into an old sea chest. When he’s ready to write some new music, he sits down and pulls out all those scribbles, which I imagine must be torn off bar napkins and beer coasters, and sorts through them, one by one. He says many of his most popular songs marinated in his sea chest before emerging as lyrics.
I do something similar in Field Notes. I reserve the last page of every notebook for my “Compost Heap,” a technique I borrowed from Neil Gaiman’s wonderful MasterClass on storytelling. Here, I write down bizarre images from dreams, lines from songs, evocative phrases, short descriptions of people I’ve met, places I’ve visited — really anything. Over a few weeks, the list grows to a page or two of disconnected images and ideas, and often, I discover a larger mosaic than my conscious mind could articulate on its own.
The whimsy of Field Notes encourages this kind of abstraction. These little books would be plenty happy to record Scrabble scores or grocery lists or meeting notes. I’ve used beautiful leather-bound journals in the past and felt that unease at despoiling that first cream-colored, thick-stock blank page. Something fancy like that would freeze me in my tracks. But a wee Field Notes notebook urges me to scribble thoughts that haven’t left that gauzy symbolic state in my mind or bump together two very different lines of thinking whose offspring becomes a new insight.
Don’t get me wrong: a computer is terrific for capturing, storing and retrieving transactional or reference information. I would never go back to the stacks of files and paper that once littered my office. And while I love the promise of technology helping me uncover new insights and connections, I have come to accept — and celebrate — that my best thinking still takes place within the humble confines of a pen and a Field Notes notebook.
Thursday, January 21, 2021 • 6 min read
I’ve kept a personal journal for most of my adult life. These journals have helped me wrestle with every significant decision and manage through the many stresses of everyday life. Last month, I put down my millionth word in over 40 years of self-reflection.
I’ve written about the reasons to keep a journal, and by far the most frequent question I receive from readers is how to establish a regular habit of journaling. Many find it easy to start a journal but much more challenging to keep it up.
For years, I purchased attractive leather-bound journals to collect my thoughts, but some of these books took years to fill with my slanted, left-handed scrawl. There were a couple tumultuous years in my twenties when all I could muster was a single angst-ridden entry. It wasn’t until I moved to a remote island where I was forced to take a solitary ferry ride to work each morning and night before my journaling habit took hold. Watching a storm-tossed sea out the cabin windows of a ferry boat put me often in the mood to write.
Now, I realize that taking a ferry boat to establish a journaling habit isn’t practical for many people. However, I did learn something else about my journal keeping that might be more useful.
Eight years ago, I tried the Day One app to see if a digital approach might replace my cherished leather-bound books. Day One was one of the first journaling apps to come out for both the Mac and iPhone/iPad. My first entry wasn’t particularly optimistic about this new technology:
I think writing here in this way will have me more focused on the device than the words. Hard to imagine myself getting into the writing zone like this, always worrying about hitting the right keys ... Still, it is convenient, tapping away as I am now from my easy chair, writing this entry on my iPad instead of surfing web sites.
Journal entry: December 12, 2012
Despite my initial uncertainty, I adapted quickly to a digital process. Since 2013, Day One has been my sole journal writing tool, and I would never go back to hand writing my journals. A few years ago, I transcribed my old paper journals into Day One for digital safekeeping and to revisit my youthful writing. With all my journals reduced to ones and zeros, I recently measured my productivity before and after switching from paper. Here’s a chart of my journal entries over a long span of writing (eight years on paper, eight years using Day One):
In my final year of paper-based journaling, I wrote 33 entries. That’s a little under once a week. My journal output shot up five-fold in my first year of using Day One. Comparing eight-year time spans on both systems, I wrote four times more entries in Day One than on paper. Over the past couple of years, I’ve written just about every day in Day One. On top of this, I share more each time I write in Day One. My typical paper entry ran 300 words. In Day One, that has increased by 20 percent, now 365 words.
After all those years of writing on paper, how did Day One make me a more prolific journal writer?
I think the most significant breakthrough for me was ubiquitous access on mobile devices. I usually kept my paper journal in the glovebox of my truck, where I wrote during ferry crossings across Puget Sound. As a result, I seldom wrote at home, or at work, or on weekends. With Day One available on the Mac, iPhone and iPad, I could capture thoughts in many more places and times. I grew especially fond of writing on the iPad with its compact size, always-connected cellular radio, and comfortable keyboard. Last year, nearly 100% of my entries were written on the iPad.
Unlike a paper journal, Day One allows practically every form of digital communication to become part of a journal entry. Emails to friends and family, Facebook posts, and blog posts are just a copy and paste away from my journal. And of course, I can add photos. I have over 500 photos, videos and sound clips in my journal that bring a whole new level of intimacy that simply wasn’t possible in my old paper journals.
After I transcribed my old journals into Day One, I realized I had the ultimate personal knowledge system. Almost everything important that happened to me in the past 40 years is accessible with a quick search. What did my doctor tell me at that visit back in 2005? I can easily retrieve it. What were my daughter’s first words? I wrote about it (today, I would have recorded it!). I apply tags to my entries, which makes it incredibly powerful to review my personal musings on themes like fatherhood, marriage, spirituality, travel, etc. All of these thoughts were buried and locked away in my paper journals but are blissfully free in Day One. It’s become an incredible resource of information and insight about myself, which in turn has become a positive reinforcement loop to keep recording my thoughts.
Some other reasons that drew me a digital tool like Day One:
If you keep buying attractive blank journals, but struggle to fill them, you should give a digital option like Day One a try. Set a daily reminder and take the few minutes you might otherwise spend on social media to write to yourself. Write about the big things in your life, but also the small, precious things. Or answer the day’s writing prompt. You might be surprised at what you share. And trust me: your future self will thank you.
Thursday, January 7, 2021 • 6 min read
About a month ago, I started using a new Mac/iOS app called Craft to help me make sense of books I read and organize ideas and content for my own writing. I was intrigued by the potential of bringing all my disparate notes into one friction-free digital home, enabling new connections and insights from all these books and ideas. The inspiration for this came from reading Sönke Ahrens’ book How to Take Smart Notes, which introduced me to Professor Luhmann’s famed Zettelkasten system.
Before discovering Craft, I used an assortment of tools that never really meshed with how I liked to work. I did my writing in Ulysses. I housed some frequently accessed PDFs in Apple Notes. I kept stacks of orphaned index cards with book notes and insights in a card box. I stored book notes and research references in DevonThink, along with lists of books I’ve read and others I wanted to read. While I enjoyed the retrieval power of DevonThink, its obtuse editing function frustrated me (why must I click into a different mode to edit a note?). Its inefficient sync process frequently had me exasperated, waiting for my notes to appear on whatever device I was using. There’s nothing that kills creativity faster than having to fiddle with technology before you can capture your thoughts. Or forgetting where you stored that quote you need for an essay you’re writing.
I was stumbling along unhappily with this setup when I heard about a new note-taking app that MacStories named their app of the year. That’s high praise for software released in November. So, what is Craft?
Craft shares note-taking functionality with apps like Evernote, Bear, Notion, or even Apple’s built-in Notes program. It works equally well on Mac, iPad and iPhone (no Android or Windows support at present). Its unique page and page-block system can include rich text, Markdown text, images, scans, Apple Pencil jottings, PDFs, and external links beautifully rendered on the same nicely formatted page. “Cards” of information and additional full pages can be inserted within a single page. With links and back-links between documents and even specific paragraphs on a page, It checks all the boxes for a proper Zettelkasten tool. Syncing is fast, sharing with others is simple and elegant, export options are robust, and real-time Google-like collaboration is built in. Ryan Christoffel’s in-depth review of Craft does a great job of showcasing the full functionality of the app.
The most important things to me were the ability to combine Markdown text and any kind of media on the same page, Zettelkasten-style links and back-links, and a native iPad app experience where I do most of my writing. I decided to give Craft a try over the holidays.
It took an evening to copy over decades worth of book notes and commonplace quotes from their various cubbyholes to Craft. I spent some extra time to drag book cover pictures my reviews and utilize the page styles that make this program so attractive.
Works great on Mac, iPhone and iPad
I began taking notes in Craft on the books I was reading. Gone were the editing frustrations and sync problems I’d faced with DevonThink. I found myself in the app a lot on whatever device I had near me — adding links to other books I’d already read with similar themes, more thinking, less fiddling. I felt drawn to the app, almost like the pull of social media apps like Facebook or Instagram, yet here, the content was my own creation.
It took another week to realize Craft is a writing tool that capably handles note storage and retrieval. To think of this as a mere note-taking app is missing the real power of the software.
The user interface is simply beautiful. Text and images are centered in the page with wide margins and plenty of white space. It reminds me of the Things task management app, which is high praise.
The beauty here is more than skin deep.
Hidden functionality awaits that is intuitive and powerful. Rearrange entire paragraphs or reorder lists by simply dragging with your finger. Pull a quote into an essay from your book review (also in Craft) using split-screen. Drag in a picture from a website or your photo album, and it appears just like you would expect. Performance is fast and stable.
Keyboard commands exist for practically everything. Markdown commands that my fingertips have long memorized transform into properly formatted text on the screen, so I don’t need to translate mentally. Links and style formatting are simple to apply, letting my mind stay focused on the content. The best way I can describe it is this: when I’m writing, I get exactly what I want without thinking about the technology. No friction. It just works. This is amazing for such a young app.
I came to Craft thinking it might replace DevonThink as my notes archive. Craft won that battle easily, at least for my needs. What I didn’t expect was a more fundamental shift in my workflow: that Craft might become my primary writing tool, replacing Ulysses.
With Craft, I seem to write better and with more focus. I’m not writing novels or a dissertation, so I don’t need most of the powerful features that come with a professional writing tool. Even so, immersed in my own curated knowledge sphere within Craft’s elegant writing interface, my elusive muse shows up and stays present much more often.
Could a beautiful, friction-free interface inspire better writing?
I have a few months before my Ulysses subscription renews. I’ll give this some time, but I do feel that Craft’s seamless, integrated writing experience could quite easily replace Ulysses as my primary writing tool. I don’t think early reviewers of Craft fully grasp the potential of this platform for writers. The tag line on Craft’s website provides a clue of their vision: “Craft brings back the joy to writing.”
My wish list for the app is surprisingly short. It needs end-to-end data encryption and better overall security. Capturing text from articles on the web with the iOS Share Sheet needs work. You can’t search inside PDFs like you can with DevonThink. Multiple windows on the Mac are a little hard to figure out. I wish TextExpander worked on iPad. But, honestly, these are minor complaints in what has quickly become an indispensable piece of software.
One thing I won’t bicker about is the subscription price. At $45 per year, it’s expensive when compared to note-taking options like Bear. But an app that handles note-taking and writing and Zettelkasten-style linking … for me, the value I’m getting matches the price. Rumor has it that a one-time purchase option may soon be available, hosted on your cloud platform of choice (iCloud, Dropbox, etc.) and without real-time collaboration, that may take away the sting of the high subscription price.
Most of all, I want to support the team that created this excellent new app to see what more they can bring to this emerging thinking and writing tool.
Give Craft a try. You might be very pleasantly surprised at what you find.
For the most recent update, see The Craft App —A Year of Magical Linking.
Wednesday, September 25, 2019 • 4 min read
Want to establish a consistent journaling habit and record your most important life events? Let me give you some simple advice from a long-time journal writer: scan your previous half dozen entries before you start to write. This two-minute drill will help you fight writer’s block and improve the overall content of your journals.
Let me explain.
Keeping a journal has many benefits. Looking back on thirty years of continuous journaling, I am grateful I took the time to capture my innermost thoughts on the big decisions I faced, the gains and the losses I experienced, and the otherwise-forgotten anecdotes of everyday life. I didn’t realize how much I would come to value the record I’ve created of my life.
The vast majority of my life’s journal is analog: my unflattering scrawl in small leather-bound books. I carried one in my battered briefcase and wrote most often while sailing on a ferry boat between my office and home.
Before sitting down to write in my journal, I would flip back through the preceding ten or twenty pages to remind myself where I left off and to help get the juices flowing for that day’s journal entry. This pre-writing review became almost an unconscious act after a time, feeling the ink with my fingertips as I scanned the pages, establishing a neural link between the present moment and the most recent past through my own words.
My journals teem with thoughts about the future: decisions I needed to make, thorny issues that were nagging me, and uncertain outcomes that hung in the balance. Scanning these recent pages before I began writing helped me address the resolution of some of those questions and improve the overall context of my journal entry as I picked up the pen and began to write.
I gave up paper journals about eight years ago and turned to Day One, a fantastic digital journaling platform. While I occasionally tap an entry from my iPhone or write a more extended entry on my office iMac, I vastly prefer the iPad for journal keeping. My entries typically run from 300 to 500 words, so I need a comfortable keyboard, and I prefer to write where I am - a wing chair in my library, a coffee shop, an airplane seat, or the cab of my truck while I’m waiting for the next ferry boat.
While digital journaling has many advantages over old-style paper, I’ve encountered two pitfalls which can diminish the quality and narrative of your journal writing “story,” or worse: stop you from writing altogether, frozen by writer’s block.
As I reviewed my earliest digital journal entries, I discovered that I was writing a lot less often than I had on paper. And I frequently repeated myself, forgetting what I had written in the previous days or weeks. I also failed to address some critical open questions I had posed during the last days or weeks. How could I leave myself hanging like this? Rereading these now, I am dismayed by the journaling amnesia of my younger self.
Why did this happen?
Every Day One entry starts with a blank screen and a flashing cursor; the proverbial blank page that can strike fear in even the most hardened writer. I have spent many wasted writing sessions entranced by that hypnotic blinking line, frozen in some meditative state, and unable to type even a single sentence.
Hemingway ended each writing session in mid-sentence, knowing exactly how he planned to finish it. This technique helped him jump-start the new day’s writing and avoid writer’s block. It’s so much easier to write after that first sentence is on the page.
Also, you’re more apt to write down independent and isolated thoughts when faced with a blank screen, disconnected from the storyline of yesterday or last week. The resulting journal over time will be more disjointed and lack continuity.
I’ve discovered that the solution to these digital journal obstacles is simple: scan your previous half dozen entries before you write.
Day One provides an easy way to flip through previous entries. On an iPad, swiping to the left lets you move to the next entry in a seamless, elegant way. I’ve trained myself to carry out this review every time I sit down to write. I almost always find one or two things I can clarify or resolve in that day’s entry. I find that these pre-writing reviews keep me from repeating myself too much, or rehashing already well-trodden topics. And I take Hemingway’s advice to start each journal entry where I last left off. No more writer’s block.
I’ve been doing these journal reviews before I write for about five years and can attest to the higher quality of the writing and the completeness of the story I am capturing in my journal.
If you’re trying to establish a journaling habit with a digital tool like Day One, consider practicing these journal reviews before you write. Take it from a 30+year constant journal keeper: your future self will thank you.
Friday, January 26, 2018 • 9 min read
This is the second installment of a multi-part series on journal writing. The first post described the benefits of keeping a journal. Here, I’ll share thoughts on where to keep your journal: paper or digital.
For most of my adult life, I’ve kept a journal. I’ve always felt a calling to record my life, perhaps some homage to my love of books and reading. My earliest journals were blank hardback books, the first of which took nearly a decade of sporadic writing to fill. After I became more convinced of my journal keeping ability, I bought lovely leather-bound books with acid-free paper and a silk ribbon to mark my place. I figured I could splurge on a book that I might carry around with me daily for a year or more. I now have a shelf full of these beautiful books after two decades of near-daily writing.
My journaling habit really took hold when I moved to Vashon 20 years ago. Vashon is an island in the middle of Puget Sound in Washington State, accessible only by ferry, so my daily commute to work each way involved thirty minutes of driving on back country roads and thirty minutes of combined waiting and sailing on a ferry boat to the mainland.
Vashon is known for many odd things, but one demographical fact is that a significant proportion of island inhabitants spend more than an hour each way in commuting to work. According to the 2000 census, only eight other zip codes in the nation have longer commuting times. Vashon shares its unique status with other towns in upstate New York and Connecticut, well known for long train rides into New York City. But Vashon? Weird fact.
With a two-hour daily commute, I had time each day to read and write. I listened to audiobooks during the driving part and turned to journal writing for the rest. With aspirations to be a writer, I figured keeping a journal would be a safe way to practice my craft. Plus, I felt compelled to record what was going on in my life, having just started a young family, moving from Seattle to a somewhat odd island, and scheming someday to leave my corporate job for a life aboard a sailboat with my family bound for unknown shores.
So I took pen to paper and kept a regular journal during this daily commute. Very soon after, my dreams of writing a great novel were dashed, having to accept that just about everything I wrote in my journal was awful. No one would want to read any part of it. After picking myself up and dusting myself off, I discovered something wonderful: it didn’t matter. The process of writing down my thoughts was helping me in other more important ways. I was soon hooked on daily journal writing.
Keeping a paper journal has its charm in today’s digital world. The feel of a real book in my hands as I prepared to write seemed to elevate my thinking, knowing whatever I wrote down would be permanent, everlasting. Before beginning to write, I would scan back over the prior entries, reacquainting myself with the recent past. This review promoted more continuity in my journal writing. My handwriting is not great, but my personality comes across better in cursive, from the emphasis I add or the hurriedness of my strokes, a sign that the words are racing out of me. I also enjoy deciphering the scratched out sections (what was I hiding from myself?) and my quirky little drawings and illustrations.
Paper journals do have their downsides. Once you fill one, access to those words is locked away. I have a dozen of these volumes stored in a box somewhere, collecting dust (more on how I solved this in a future post). Security is also lacking unless you’re careful to protect your journal from prying eyes. I once came home to my upset spouse after she found an old journal of mine which described an event which occurred long, long before we were married. She was too mad to be embarrassed at reading someone else’s journal and we quickly made up. The lesson remains. Finally, the types of things you can put in a journal are pretty limited: your handwriting, perhaps a drawing, a taped in picture or memento. It’s not practical to transcribe special emails, social media posts, or all the photos we now take with the ubiquitous smartphone cameras in our pockets.
As a technology fan, I always felt that a computer-based journal would make sense for me. I tried many different solutions over the past 15 years, from simple word processing tools to dedicated journaling software. None of these stuck for two main reasons: first, these solutions required a computer for the writing, and even a smallish laptop is still a lot less portable and convenient than a small journal. Paper and pen are hard to beat as a proven technology. And second, I found my writing style at a keyboard was too business-like from years of professional writing, and I got stymied by a blank screen and blinking cursor. None could replace my precious journal, trusted blue pen and the lap desk that I stowed away in my truck during my ferry commute.
The iPhone, the iPad, and one beautifully designed writing app changed all that.
About six years ago, I switched over to a digital journaling platform called Day One. I started with this app on the Mac, but my electronic journaling flourished once I began using iPad. Here was a device that I carried with me everywhere, and when paired with a keyboard, was a terrific writing tool, small yet powerful, and for me, omnipresent. Day One deserves a dedicated post, but I’ll summarize why this app is so fabulous here:
There are a few drawbacks with Day One. First, it’s only available on the Mac, though both iOS and Android app are available on mobile devices. Second, an annual subscription is required to take advantage of its power and functionality. A lot of folks grumbled about this, but I was delighted when Day One made the switch to a subscription platform. I will gladly pay the $35 per year for software I use every day, knowing the company is now on solid financial footing in the crazy and non-sustainable app development world. Third, with all my journals in the cloud, there is a chance someone could hack into my account and gain access, despite the fancy encryption and passwords, to every personal word I’ve ever written. This is the new world we live in, and I grudgingly accept this risk.
I can share now after five full years of daily journal writing in Day One that I am a complete convert. I think better now at a keyboard and write without hesitation, even with a blinking cursor to taunt me. I believe my writing quality has increased without losing the intimacy and honesty of my pen and paper journal writing. I’ve lost the rhythm and practice of writing by hand, though I’ll admit I sometimes miss the tangible benefits of writing in a real book - the heft of the book, the personality of the pen strokes, the perceived longevity of text on paper.
With three decades of constant journaling behind me, I relish the ability to look back on private musings I wrote so many years ago, all from my iPhone. In fact, one of my morning rituals is to open Day One and read over the half-dozen or more entries I wrote on that day over the past decades. What an incredible gift it is to re-ignite those memories each morning. I can’t think of a better way to reflect on this amazing journey we’re all taking.
The answer depends on which format best supports your writing habit. For me, the transition from keeping a paper journal to typing on a keyboard took years before it finally clicked. It was definitely a journey. Now I can’t imagine going back to a paper journal. But the best journal format is the one that keeps you writing, or at the very minimum, doesn’t stop you from writing. Find one you feel comfortable confiding in and write. And write again. Simple advice, maybe hard to implement.
If you’ve found your journal muse, what do you use, book or digital? I would love to read your feedback in the comment section below.
Wednesday, January 17, 2018 • 12 min read
You should keep a journal and ideally write in it every day. You’ve likely heard that advice already. The internet is full of articles and research on why journaling is good for you. I’ve read a lot of these myself.
One memorable take on journaling came from the Asian Efficiency Podcast last year. While I agreed with most of the points made by the hosts and was thankful to learn some new tips to improve my journal process, I chuckled at their youthful exuberance, and frankly, inexperience with journaling. Neither had kept a journal beyond a few short years, so they couldn’t speak with much conviction about the tangible benefits of journaling.
Creating and sustaining a habit of keeping a journal can be difficult, regardless of the benefits, so I thought I might share some tips from someone with more than 30 years of constant journaling.
This is the first of a multi-part series on journal-keeping. Subsequent articles will address more advanced topics, but today let’s focus on the benefits of keeping a journal. Why dedicate the time to keep a journal? Let me describe five key benefits that matter to me.
Life is short. Time does seem to speed up as you age. For me, keeping a journal slows down the race of time. Spending a few minutes to review thoughts on events or feelings from a year ago, five years ago, or even twenty years ago, brings the memories to life so vividly. Photographs do this too, but reading your own words, reliving the emotion you felt, the happiness or sadness, reminding you of something you thought so essential but had forgotten is like a time machine that helps connect the individual days into a more extensive mosaic of my life. Once reminded of that time, our super-computer brains start to fill in other forgotten details, and before you know it, you’re back in that time and place again. I love this feeling of connectedness to my past from the present.
In its most basic form, a journal is a record of your life; a natural place to write down significant life events: births, deaths, marriages, etc. But for me, I prize those past entries that record the small things in life that I would have most certainly forgotten, like this passage from fourteen years ago when my now college/high school age kids were four and one:
"I took Mallory and Connor to Dockton Park on Saturday. The day was chilly, so we all bundled up and piled into the van. Mallory and Connor sit side-by-side in car seats, close enough for Mallory to give Connor food or toys, etc. When we arrived at the park, I found the two of them holding hands. Very precious. I set Connor in one of the baby swings and swung him to his utter chagrin. He seemed genuinely afraid so I slowed him down to a mere sway and he settled down a bit. Mallory knows how to swing, of course, and she did so with gusto until her hands got too cold. We moved to the play structure. A few minutes there and then a stroller ride down to the docks. The ramp down to the dock was very steep because of the tide, so I carried Mallory in one arm and held on for dear life to the stroller with the other and slowly wobbled down the ramp. Walking along the dock, Connor peered out quietly from under his fleece. From above (my angle), it look like the cap was pressed down over his eyes, but because of his angle of repose, he could see through a small gap between cap and cheek. Mallory jumped from one side of the dock to the other, picking up shells, pointing out bird poop, admiring a bucket full of freshly caught crabs. After a while, we headed back for the car and home. When I went to unbuckle them from their car seats, I found them holding hands again."
I am glad I captured these memories of my children now that they are mostly adults and share few of these tender behaviors. Reading about times long ago with dear family members who have now passed on, just little anecdotes really, pack an emotional punch today. All sorts of notes and worries litter my journals, but every once in a while I run across an entry like this, and I thank my former self for keeping these journals.
Reducing stress is one of the most immediate, tangible benefits of writing in a journal. When I was younger, I would get painful headaches in the afternoon and early evening, pulsing in a particular spot on the back of my head. These pains occurred on weekdays, and almost never on the weekends which pointed to work stress as the culprit. I began using my journal time as therapy for these headaches and discovered that just 15 minutes of reflective writing would do better than three Advil could, and faster (and healthier!). The trick for me was to forget about the headache and focus my writing on what I was feeling that day, what was bothering me. That simple mindfulness exercise became such a blessing that I learned how to perform it eventually in the moment and eradicated the awful headaches from my life.
One theory I have for why work can create physical stress symptoms in me has to do with two things: introversion and something I call the Input/Output Balance. Introverts make up nearly half the population, but some small fraction of the everyday chatter in the workplace. Extroverts get energy from sharing their thoughts verbally, often preliminary and sometimes contradictory ideas as a way to refine their thinking. I can share from personal experience that Introverts prefer time to process before openly sharing ideas. Couple all that talking with the avalanche of digital information that we absorb in the course of a workday: email, social media, reports, spreadsheets, etc. By the end of the day, the typical introvert can be overwhelmed by all this input and may feel out of balance. Keeping a journal, particularly at the end of the workday, is an excellent escape valve to process all that input and balance out the scales with considered output.
A popular way to use a journal to boost your happiness is through a gratitude journal, also called the “Five-minute Journal.” Author Tim Ferriss of the Four-Hour Workweek explores the method: every morning, you list three things for which you’re grateful, three things that would make the coming day great, and one or two affirmations about yourself (“I am a good listener”, “I have good ideas”, etc.). Doing this first thing in the morning helps create a success-oriented mindset. At the end of the day, you finish the entry with a description of three amazing things that happened that day and any notes on what could have made the day better. This process should take no longer than five minutes with practice. Keeping a gratitude journal for thirty consecutive days could change your brain and make you feel happier. I’ve practiced this gratitude approach in my journal at various times in my life when I believed I could use a lift in spirits. Being thankful for the good things in your life does indeed change your mood, and prepping your subconscious with thoughts on what could make today a great day really does work. Starting a gratitude journal would be an excellent way to get going with your journal keeping habit.
A personal journal is an excellent place to think through big decisions in your life. I’m a finance guy, and for a lot of choices, I have an Excel spreadsheet that helps me articulate the decision process, financial ramifications, pros and cons scored and weighted, etc. And for black and white decisions, that’s usually enough. But many decisions aren’t so easy, and I would find myself staring at the spreadsheet in indecision, or worse, gaming the inputs to get to the decision my emotional side wanted. My elaborate spreadsheet on whether to buy a sailboat is a terrific example of this.
That’s where my journal comes in.
I have debated many, many decisions in the pages of my journal over the years. My journal is a safe place to explore an uncertain future without anyone but my subconscious looking over my shoulder. I will usually try to articulate what would be the worst thing that could happen if I take a particular path. In my case, I have a healthy fear of failure which can hold me back in making decisions. Facing this fear and putting into a broader context has helped keep me balanced in my decision-making.
Deciding to go back to school to earn my master’s degree while working full-time is a good example of a decision I wrestled with in my journal. At the time I had a brutal work schedule and two small children at home. The idea of taking on another 20 - 30 hours of class work and study each week seemed impossible, maybe even suicidal. But I knew that my career advancement would stall without the degree, and I would probably come to regret not going for it later in life. I must have written dozens of journal entries on this one decision over the course of a year, weighing the pros and cons, facing the fear of letting down my family or performing poorly on the job, or burning myself out. In the end, I convinced myself to do it, and while it was incredibly challenging, it turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.
There’s a cumulative benefit of recording your thoughts about pivotal decisions over a longer span of years and even decades. Steve Jobs once said:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
It is helpful to me now to look back over twenty years of life decisions, some small and some tremendous, and retrace my train of thought on how I was dealing with the uncertainty surrounding the decision. With hindsight, I now see where I was over-emphasizing particular risks or downplaying others. I can critique my decision-making style to seek out blind spots and biases. Of course, this doesn’t allow me to see the future any better, but it does help me better understand myself, and I believe, help me make better decisions as a result of the insight my journals provide me.
You hear it all the time. If you want to change your life, you need to set goals on how and where you want to improve. And to make them stick, you need to write them down.
Early in my career, I read Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. One of these habits is to begin with the end in mind, and Mr. Covey suggests a goal-setting process centered around the most critical roles in your life. For example, father, friend, spouse, community leader, team leader, etc. This advice helped me stay balanced in my priorities and goals, and I think without it, I may have over-emphasized some areas of my life (i.e., work) over others.
I set my goals for each role in my life every year during the end of year holiday season. I use this quiet time to reflect back on how I fared last year with my goals and give myself letter grades on my performance. I am a pretty tough grader within the safety of my journal, and I believe this self-assessment helps create stronger commitment and accountability to the goal-setting process. Once I’m done looking back, I write out what I hope to accomplish in the coming year for the major roles in my life. These goal setting journal entries are time-consuming to write. I may take a whole week to reflect and prioritize, to soul-search, before committing. During the year I will frequently look back on this goal-setting journal entry to check my progress and make sure I’m dedicating the right level of energy and time to each role and goal.
I’ve used my journal for goal setting for a long time. Again, I’ll share how gratifying it is to look back over the years to see my progress, achieving things that my younger-self worried might be difficult if not impossible.
Over time and with practice, your journal can be a blank canvas to address life’s big questions. I’ve found that getting at these universal mysteries is a bit tricky. A blank page or blinking cursor still strikes terror in me when I force myself to write about anything serious. Instead, I might start an entry about some small event, and many end up just that, but a few of these start to tackle some deeply rooted belief once my subconscious mind loosens up enough to unlock. When I write without any agenda – free writing – I sometimes indirectly land on a universal question:
What is important to me? Where do we go from here? Why are we here?
Rereading journal entries that made this detour remind me a little of a Ouija board - for the author of the banal part of the entry sounds a lot different than the soul-searching part. Who’s indeed penning these words? But I love these heart-felt honest missives. I apply a unique “insights” tag to these entries in Day One (more on this software in a future article), so I can see how my questions (and some answers) have evolved over the decades I’ve kept a journal. Patterns have emerged that paint a pretty complete picture of who I am and what I believe. Having this sense about myself, who I am, gives me a pretty solid footing and compass as I approach the chaos and contrary winds of everyday life. I think this self-awareness that my journals have taught me has made me a better human being, one more capable of helping others. Like we’re told every time we fly: “please secure your mask before assisting others.” Knowing who I am and what I stand for is the oxygen that I need to serve others.
Yes! After thirty years, thousands of entries, and countless hours, I heartily endorse keeping a private journal. I can’t think of a better tool I’ve used to help me stay happy, healthy and successful over the course of the past thirty years. Wherever you are in life, there’s no time like now to start. If you’re lucky enough to heed this advice in your twenties or thirties and commit to a regular habit of journal writing, I believe it can change your life.
Getting started is easy. Sticking with it is harder. I’ll share my tips on how I was able to start and keep a regular journal habit spanning three decades in the next post. Stay tuned.
Are you keeping a journal now? What has been your experience? Leave your feedback and questions in the comment section below.