Has anyone here come up with a simple “Daily Note” system? Just looking for ideas…
3 Likes
One way: Automate your notes with Shortcuts and Bear.
Or make a shortcut, like:
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/da44a116a4634fe397d9201d410e11bc
1 Like
This is excellent - are you willing to share your shortcut for this?
Thank you @HumbleBear - I checked it out, and I like the simplicity. However, it creates a note with a triple digit day. Any idea why that might be happening? I am running it on macOS Ventura. Thoughts?
3 Likes
Thank you @bolive - Would you be willing to share your shortcut(s) here? Especially for those of us (like me) who can never make a shortcut of their own to work… 
I’ve you modify the “Format Date” section, and make the format ISO 8601, this will resolve your issue 
And lead to this:
Btw, I recommend having the tag upto the month unless you have lots of notes related to a single day. Often #Year/Month is used as well.
I’ve adjusted the shortcut for this also:
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/364e3a640d0b4ea69432ca3fa98442c3
Looks like this:
And gives you a note like this:
3 Likes
Thank you for your help! Much appreciated. 
1 Like
Thanks for the inspiration @HumbleBear. I’ve taken your shortcut and modified it some. My version has a customizable root tag, and if the daily note already exists it will be found and opened instead of creating a duplicate.
Please check it out here: [Open Bear Daily Note (Apple Shortcuts)](Shortcuts)
Edit: Keep scrolling, here’s an updated version of the shortcut available later in the thread! 
2 Likes
Very cool - I like what you’ve done with it!
This great! I like the “fine tuning” you did. Question (see screenshot attached) how do I add a couple lines between the Title and tag? I don’t want to have to do a couple hard returns every time and then move my cursor back to the top. Thoughts?
1 Like
@danmills7 Wow that was a lot of fun. I found a pretty subtle bug with how the create note shortcut action combines blank space and tags, but here’s an updated version of my shortcut. It has a workaround for the bug, and supports having a daily note template in the shortcut. The default template is just a couple empty lines.
THANK YOU! It works great! I am seriously considering moving from Craft to Bear, and this was a sticking point for me.
May want to pin the Daily Note so it’s easily accessible. When running the shortcut would want to search for existing one and un-pin that one and then pin the new one.
1 Like
@bolive I love that idea!
I spent some time testing it out as a modification to my daily note shortcut. Unfortunately, there are a few complexities since the shortcut doesn’t have perfect knowledge of what notes it has pinned versus those the user has pinned.
With a loose search (e.g. find me all previous daily notes using the root tag) the un-pin search could cause inadvertent un-pinning of things the user had pinned outside of the daily notes. With a more exacting search, it would become very slow because the shortcut would need to compose titles and tags for every day looking back through some period of time. That might be worth it. Our Apple Silicon devices are pretty fast these days.
I’m going to try pinning my daily notes manually for a while though, and see if that helps my workflow. Personally, I’m usually on my Mac when working with daily notes, and I have been keeping them open in a separate window for convenience.
Here is what I do. At the beginning of the shortcut I search for the daily note via the tag and pinned.
Then, at the end of the shortcut, when adding the new note, it get pinned so that I have the current daily note pinned.
2 Likes
Do you happen to have a copy of the shortcut with those customizations in place? I’d be interested in giving it a try.
Here is a link to my Daily a note shortcut.
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/a607083c2ff24b70bb8b48bb032078f4
You’ll notice that I call a number of other shortcuts to be able to easily add/remove content to the Daily Note.
I have a calendar called Tasks that I put any recurring tasks into that shows up in the Tasks area. That calendar is hidden when looking at the calendar. I just use the calendar to handle the recurring part.
Also, get the regular calendar events for the day and they are placed in the Calendar section.
I have several supporting Shortcuts that I use throughout the day such as a log entries. Where it prompts me with a text box (Get Input) and appends to the end of the Daily Note (or other project logs that I have).
I also have a Check In shortcut that that just puts in various information at the current time. Here is an example.
11:13AM - Check in (iPhone)
78° (Feels like 82°F)
66% chance of rain
Elevation: 313ft.
1711 steps (0.9 miles)
{puts physical address here}
(35.83904102699846, -78.89853535941256)
Here is a partial screenshot of what it generates:
I also have a Shortcut that works similar to Obsidian that scans all of the Bear notes and pulls out the un-completed tasks and creates a new note with a Header (the page) and the tasks beneath it. It is based on the extended search feature of Bear (@todo) and just uses regular expressions to pull the todos out of the note and builds a new note. Of course if I you check one off in the new note it does not check it off in the original page like Obsidian does but at least gives an overview of outstanding tasks consolidated.
3 Likes
I been thinking about how to extend Bear without ending up with a hodge-podge of things the devs have to deal with. If Bear is remaining in the Apple ecosystem it would be a real advantage to have a “code” placeholder that ran an Apple Shortcut and the placeholder is replaced with what the shortcut returns.
So, when a note is opened it runs Apple shortcuts from the “code” placeholders that are on the page. This may be an easy way for the devs to incorporate “live” pages and leaving the work to shortcuts (thus Apple).
I can think of a lot of things that could be built with that implementation. People can share shortcuts. This is what made Microsoft so popular back in the day. They made Visual Basic very extensible for 3rd parties to make controls and made it easy to build Windows programs and they took off.