I value journaling, but I rarely keep it up for more than a couple of days. So I wanted something that mimics part of the benefits of having a journal in the form of an (Obsidian) Daily Note. Ideally in a mostly automated way.
So for this experiment I started making a list of the things that I do daily that could be automated into an entry in my journal note. Think of things like checking off an item in the MacOS Reminders app, when taking notes and X posting.
Instead of writing it manually, I started thinking in terms of data that already exists. And convert it into my daily journal.
I just asked Codex what the way to go would be for this use case. Of course it started to add all sorts of things I hadn’t initially thought of.
All good suggestions that I wanted to have, but also things that started to complicate things a lot. With an expanded scope the risk of not finishing this increases significantly. I needed to post this write-up today, so no room for expansion.
So I chose simplicity and just have my calendar entries added into my Obsidian daily note for now.
It suggested to build a CLI integration. It would create no UI overhead and is fast and direct.
So after a few iterations with Codex it was completed and a new app has been born in the CLI! I tested it and it worked just how I imagined it to work. Running the command and the daily Obsidian note automatically got the entries from the calendar imported.
Key Insight:
Consistent journaling is not a writing problem. It is a data extraction problem in my case.