My plaintext logging approach

On and off, I use an approach of logging thoughts in plaintext.

Here is what it looks like:

2022-03-08 Tuesday
  o Holiday

2022-03-07 Sunday
  o Vacation

---

2022-03-06 Sunday
  • Publish week­notes

2022-03-05 Saturday
  x Draft week­notes
  - That C tweet sure went viral
  • Groceries

2022-03-04 Friday
  o Vacation
  - Made giant batch of pasta sauce
  > Groceries

Icons:

• • is a to-do item
• x is a to-do item, completed
• > is a to-do item, postponed
• - is a quick note
• o is an event

Each entry is quite short — just a single line. More in-depth writing goes into my notebook, for which I use Bear.

Weeks are separated by ---. This makes finding the right week easier.

Past months are moved into a separate text file. This way, everything I need is in one text file, and past notes are out of mind and out of sight.

Advantages

• Plain text is so easy to deal with. So easy.

• I can use TextEdit, which is a 27-years-old app. I trust it.

• Because it’s entirely up to me how I format this file, I can adjust the format over time, and thus make it follow my approach.

Prior work

• Patrick Rhone has a similar system.¹¹1 Patrick Rhone, “The Dash/Plus System,” January 1, 2013. 

See also

• Derek Sivers: Write plain text files
• Patrick Rhone: Proven