Managing large numbers of journal entries in Day One is easier because it naturally organizes everything by date with its built-in calendar system and tags.
If I import my journal entries using Bear’s Day One Importer, the first line of the journal entry becomes the title. Since I use Quick Open (CMD-O) almost exclusively to navigate notes, those 4,500 first lines from my journal make it practically impossible to find anything because of the avalanche of similar and duplicate note names that pop up.
Further, importing new notes with duplicate note names (I tend to be repetitive in my journal!) creates havoc with existing links (see this forum post on that issue). I learned this the hard way.
By renaming the journal entries to a sortable date format like YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM, the functionality of Quick Open isn’t cluttered, and you can quickly navigate to a specific journal entry either by Quick Open or in the tag organizational pane, and existing links are preserved.
I use a simple Apple Shortcut to populate the title with the current date and time for new entries.
Again, I’ve got all this working now, but allowing the option to title the entries with the entry date instead of first line might save some headache for others attempting to import a large number of Day One journal entries into Bear.
I hope this makes sense…