I whipped up a quick little extension for Alfred that lets me very quickly jot down time-stamped text. The hope is that if I make it ridiculously easy to log what I’m doing and when, then maybe I can have better records of what I’m doing and it will be easier for me to switch back to task after interruptions. I can also look at where I’m spending my time.
I have this extension mapped to the keyword “nj” (for “nvALT Journal”). I activate Alfred and type “nj <text>” and the extension automatically opens up nvALT and makes sure that there’s a note with the current date in the form “YYYY-mm-dd” and then appends my text to the end of the note with a 24 hour timestamp in front of it. It then switches back to the application that I was previously in so I can go immediately back to whatever I was doing.
I tweaked it a bit to allow non-English characters as well.
https://gist.github.com/3297504
can not type Chinese text
Great extension, thank you Marc! Additionally, what parts do I need to delete from your script to post without time stamp continuously into one file? I know, this is probably very easy, but as I am new to applescript I did not mange on my own. Thanks.
Hey sample,
If you want to take out the timestamp, then look inside the .alfredextension bundle for a file called
info.plistand then remove all the stuff that referencestheDate, etc.Thank you!
Great extension. A real joy to use. Thank you?
Thank you for making this extension. It has simplified my life a lot.
It is perfect for writing journal.
I also want a slightly different version of it too for academic /professional note taking. That is, I want to input Title and Tag in place of time stamp. Can you help me in modifying it?
The idea is: I want to have a format nn :::
inserting a phrase followed by a colon followed by a phrase magically converting the two phrases between the colons into Title and Tag.
is this achievable?
thanks
Hi Mark,
thank you for the workflow. I tweaked the script a bit, to move the cursor at the end of the journal entry before appending the new text.
What I’ve changed:
tell application “nvALT”
activate
tell application “System Events”
keystroke “l” using command down
keystroke theDate & return
keystroke key code 125 using command down
keystroke return & return
keystroke theTime & ” — ” & q
keystroke tab using {command down}
end tell
end tell
Any chance of getting the .alfredworkflow version of it for Alfred 2?
Cheers