2025-02-05

I've been neglecting Cartoon Gravity of late, because lots of things needed to be taken care of at the beginning of the year (mostly things that didn't get done at the end of last year!).

I'm still here though, and there have been posts to Development Hell and the Pleasant Green Blog, as many of you will be aware.

One thing I have been careful to do this year is to prune back the app stack. I'm not using any conspicuous PKM apps now; my notes are mostly being done with actual ink on actual paper, or else I am using something basic like Ulysses to keep track of things.

My digital journaling (which exists randomly alongside my physical journal) is now housed in one monthly file in Ulysses, with a header for each day. This makes it much easier to refer back to earlier in the month, and means I am generating one file instead of 31, which is neater and easier to deal with.

I am LOVING Ulysses at the moment. It has become my first port of call every day, and it's where my novel is being written. Journaling here too (as well as doing story outlining) means that I am in the app most of the day and that makes it really easier to just open a blank sheet and write something like this when the mood grabs me.

I have also got back into Day One, which has been quietly logging health stats and Raindrop saves in the background without me using it, but which has the "On This Day" feature, showing you where you were and what you were doing on this day in past years, which turns out to be really interesting and valuable. Remembering to manually log stuff into Day One can be a bit of a chore (and it has not yet become a habit) but I'm looking at it as something I will be glad I did in a few years time.

If anyone else out there is using Day One, or has a particularly good bookmarking app, I'd be interested to hear about it.