Yearly Recaps: A Monthly, Contextual, Plain-Text Journaling System

While I regularly maintain a daily journal, and do so in plain text (while also keeping a concurrent journal in the Momento app on my iPhone for the search and tagging features), often I find that I never actually read any of the old entries. Which is fine, as I mostly just like the habit of recording the information. Recently, I developed a system that is proving to be immensely useful.

Add Entries to Day One via Text File

I use this setup to automate the addition of new entries in Day One by saving text files via Drafts to Dropbox. You lose the location and weather info, but those can be manually added. The Mac app doesn’t even support them yet anyways.

Automatically Create a Specific Folder Structure with Automator & Hazel

Here’s a method using Automator and Hazel to automatically create a specific folder structure within a folder. I use this for client projects, since they are always the same. With this setup, I just add a new folder to my “Clients” folder, and all the standard sub-folders I need added are auto-created by Hazel, via Automator. 

Mac OS X Services: Import Files into Evernote using AppleScript

An interesting method  to use Mac OS X Services to Import Files into Evernote by Nine Boxes. Of particular note here is the AppleScript used in the post, which could easily be hijacked to use in conjunction with Hazel to automate the addiction by dropping files into a watched folder.

AppleScript: Add Stuff to Evernote

A simple but handy AppleScript to add files to Evernote. Excellent for use with Hazel. Includes syntax for choosing a specific notebook and adding tags.

Hazel: Basic Sync

Over on the Noodlesoft Forums for Mac OS X automation utility Hazel, I found this basic sync recipe for setting up a folder sync. Sometimes it’s easier to get going with Hazel when you see an example.

This one was created by the developer, so you know it’s correct. I was looking to set up a sync for my personal art projects, where anything created in the last 6 months was synced to Dropbox for easy access on multiple devices. Works great.

Hazel: Essential Mac Automation Tool

Hazel is hands-down one of my top Mac productivity software tools. And it’s one of those tools that tough to describe exactly why you would want it, because what it does is up to the user. In its most simplest form, Hazel is a utility that watches folders you tell it to watch, and does things to files that meet the criteria you set up. A very small set of actions it can perform are things like setting the color label of the file, renaming a file, moving files into subfolders, moving files to other folders (including the Trash), run AppleScripts and Automator actions, import files to iPhoto or iTunes, open files, set Spotlight comments, and lots more.

If you’ve ever used Smart Playlists in iTunes, then you’ll understand how Hazel works. But Hazel goes a step further and lets you perform actions on the files that meet the criteria in the “Smart Playlists”. If you are familiar with Folder Actions in OS X, Hazel is like Folder Actions on steroids. The best way to explain Hazel is to give you a few of my usage examples, but keep in mind that there are not “built-in”, nor are you limited to these actions. They are just some of the many things I use Hazel to automate on my Mac.

Auto-Increment File Names in OS X with Hazel

For client artwork, I save a lot of versions of files. Enough so that I got tired of manually incrementing the file names when saving JPEGs from Photoshop and decided to see if Hazel could automate this for me. It wasn’t apparent how to do this at first, but the Hazel developer steered me in the right direction. Here’s how to do it.

Control Your Mac Remotely with Drafts, Hazel, Dropbox & AppleScript

I wanted to set up a way to to toggle my Mac’s system volume setting from the iPhone. But this technique could be used for any AppleScript you’d like to trigger remotely from your iPhone. Here’s how I did it.