For some time now (from February or even earlier) I have a daily practice called “On this day”. I read any diary entries I have for this calendar day for previous years (2014, 2016 and from 2019 until now).

What’s the profit? Besides obvious reasons like recalling events and comparing yourself with the past one?

I experienced one more time some hard events from my past, looked at them from a different angle. I recall some parts of my identity and try to reintegrate them. I see difficulties of past and I feel my growth. And yes, I recall some trips in full details.

Some entries are sad but that’s ok — that sadness is already gone, it’s in the past. Just hug your past self and move on.

It shouldn’t be always with serious face — some entries are just cringe and that’s all. It’s me 10 years earlier, it would be strange if I agreed with all my thoughts of that time.

I’m happy that I tried it, reconfigured it a few times for own comfort and now I have such a great tool.

Tech details

Right now I log my days in Apple Notes. Previously it was Bear, but I moved diary, because Bear background sync doesn’t work well with creating notes from Shortcuts.

At the end of the month I export all notes to local archive and backup it. And since I need notes only for previous years, I can load it from local files.

I connect Alfred workflow with self-written bash script (nothing fancy, it just works) and now by simple command I create file with all suitable entries. Alfred is just a executor, you could run script from terminal or other places like Apple Shortcuts.

Bash script

There are variables which need to be declare separately:

• FILE_RESULT — temp file, I use /tmp/on_this_day.log
• DIR_PATH — path with all diary entries
• EDITOR — I use Sublime Text for this.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

MONTH_DAY=`date +'%m-%d'`
YEAR=`date +'%Y'`

> ${FILE_RESULT}

find "${DIR_PATH}" -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "*-${MONTH_DAY}.md" -type f ! -name "${YEAR}-${MONTH_DAY}.md" -print0 | while read -d $'\0' FILE
do
  FILE_NAME=$(basename "${FILE}")
  printf "\n\n---\n${FILE_NAME}\n---\n\n" >> ${FILE_RESULT}
    cat "${FILE}" >> ${FILE_RESULT}
done

${EDITOR} ${FILE_RESULT}