My Day One Journals (January 2026)

January 16, 2026

I’ve been crashing out lately about my long and unproductive relationship with personal knowledge management (PKM).

I’ve slowly been coming to the conclusion that I do not want to engage in a deliberate practice of notating everything I read, watch, and experience, then generating atomic notes from these sources, linking them together, and waiting for writing to become “easy” and emerge naturally from this practice of note taking.

I’m not bashing it in general. I’m obsessed with the concept of bi-directionally linking notes. It’s awesome! Zettelkasten? Incredible!

It’s just not what works for the role I want writing to play in my life.

Over the last 5 years or so that I’ve been actively pursuing PKM, sillily migrating my growing pile of notes from new tool to new tool (hello, Roam Research, Notion, Obsidian, etc…), I’ve generating SHOCKINGLY FEW published pieces of writing on my blog and in my journal, which happen to be the places I really do enjoy and care about publishing

I think the time has come to get out of this toxic relationship once and for all. I’ve come to realize that I don’t want a system to surface insights as I meticulously update a database of reference material. I simply want to record the insights I have. And what better place to do that than the Day One app.

A brief tour of my journals

The majority of my journals exist purely for archival purposes. Journals for when I feel like recording movies, shows, books, or music I find notable. A blog journal as permanent storage for all my blog posts so I don’t lose them when I inevitably switch to a new blogging platform. Correspondence for letters, postcards, and the occasional screen shot of a meaningful email or text message.

The Personal Journal is where I just write whatever I want, usually in a dedicated writing session. It’s also where I capture moments and memories. Most entries could probably be grouped into memories (photos, describing events), reflections (musing on what’s been going on or what I’m thinking about lately), and really raw, vulnerable (terrifyingly so, sometimes) writing as I work through struggles, challenges, and the like, trying to make sense of it all.

New this year is the Diary. This is the universal inbox that facilitates the frictionless capturing of thoughts on the go described in the design principles of my insight capture system. I have the action button on my iPhone programmed to open a new note in this journal. From there, I can quickly snap a photo, record and transcribe a voice memo, or jot down my thoughts.

As part of my review process, I will sometimes merge multiple entries from the Diary, write a few sentences to clarify my thinking, or move entries to a more appropriate journal.

I don’t use my Decision and Failure journals very often. I really should use them more, because when I do, I get immense value out of it. Here are my templates for those.

Decision journal template

# Decision:
What's the decision?

## I Think The results will lead to:

## Why?

## How Do I feel about it?

## Next Steps:

## Review date

## Actual results

## What does this reveal about my strengths?

Failure journal template

# FAILURE
Describe what happened 

## Why did it happen? (5X)
1. 
2. 
3. 
4. 
5. 

## What weakness of mine does this highlight?

## What strength of mine could compensate for this?

## What environmental change could automate the removal of the root cause?

## Action item(s) 

## Review date

##Has the failure been repeated?

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