Keep a Book Journal with Day One and Apple Shortcuts

One of the easiest ways to get more out of the books you read is to keep a journal. When you take notes, you’re not just passively reading; you’re reshaping the material in your own words, deepening your comprehension and the connections in your brain. These notes become a record you can revisit to refresh your memory and make recall easier.

I’ve used Day One as my journal for years, but I only recently discovered how well it works to keep my notes and favorite passages from my reading.

Day One is a leading journaling app for the Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android, and most recently for Windows. Journals are protected from prying eyes using secure end-to-end encryption. Prompts and suggestions help remove writer’s block about what to share. The app makes it simple to create an entry from a photo, from your Apple Watch, from a location you visited, and many other ways that remove the friction from keeping a journal. I liked Day One so much that I transcribed a dozen old paper journals to have a complete digital record of my life in the app.

Day One requires an annual subscription for its premium-level service, but a free version is available that works for many users.

In this post, I’ll share the benefits of keeping a book journal and a link to an Apple Shortcut that automates a big part of tracking your reading in Day One.

Why a Reading Journal

The practice of keeping a reading journal dates back centuries. Known as commonplace books, scholars filled notebooks with anecdotes, favorite passages, and bits of wisdom from their reading and study. Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson kept one. Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations as a quasi-commonplace book. Ralph Waldo Emerson filled over 180 notebooks with his reading notes and reflections.

For modern-day bookworms, Day One is the perfect tool for this, especially if you already use it for personal journaling.

The journal timeline of your reading history serves as a visual reminder of the books you’ve read and makes it simple to scroll through the list and review your notes and favorite quotes.

Intertwining your reading and personal journal provides a unique opportunity to revisit and remember the past. Seeing a book you read three years ago in the “On This Day” view of Day One will remind you not only of the book but also what else you were doing or thinking when you read it. Likewise, a journal is the ideal place to meditate on what you’ve learned and how you might apply it to your life. Reading and journaling are natural bedfellows.

Elements of the Book Journal

The book journal in Day One creates a separate entry for each book using the date you finished the book as the journal entry date.

For each book, it records the title and author, your rating on a five-star scale, the genre and reading format, and whether you owned or borrowed the book from the library. This information is presented as a summary line at the top of the entry that is easy to scan from the sidebar timeline.

I chose not to record the publisher, page count, year written, or other book data points. Instead, I insert a Goodreads link to the book, which has all that information just a click away.

There is space to record your thoughts and a section for highlights you marked in the book. Finally, the entry includes an image of the book cover that shows up nicely in the sidebar.

Here’s a view of this journal in Day One on my iPad:

… and examples of book entries on my iPhone:

… and two views from Day One on the Mac, showing the journal calendar and media to provide an idea of how book covers are used to remind you of your reading visually:

A Private Alternative to Goodreads

Many avid readers use Goodreads to track the books they read. Consider this book journal as a private alternative or addition to Goodreads. One that you don’t have to worry about privacy, or how followers or others might react to your reading notes.

Goodreads is Amazon-owned, and while you can export basic reading data, it’s harder to get detailed notes or highlights out in a structured way. In contrast, Day One entries can easily be exported elsewhere. The Bear app has a built-in Day One importer; Bear can also export to many formats, including plain text. This Obsidian plug-in converts Day One entries into Markdown text that Obsidian can read or any app that supports plain text. This portability gives me peace of mind that the contents of my journal in Day One are truly future-proof.

Using free online services always brings a risk of continuity and profit motives. I still use Goodreads, but I like having a place where I can write with complete privacy about what I’m reading.

The Book Journal Shortcut

When I understood how great it would be to have my book journal in Day One, I wrote a program with Keyboard Maestro to copy over the 400 book notes I kept in Bear. It took a couple of hours to write the macro and copy the book notes, but when I finished, I had eight years of reading history in Day One.

Keyboard Maestro isn’t available on the iPad, where I do most of my writing, so if I wanted to create new Book Journal entries on the iPad, I would have to figure out how to do it in Apple Shortcuts, the only automation tool that works on all Apple devices.

It took much more time to accomplish this in Shortcuts, partly because I have less experience with it and also because it’s not nearly as powerful. The trickiest part was pinging the Google Books database for book covers, but I eventually figured it out.

Here’s the link to the Book Journal Apple Shortcut:

Book Journal for Day One

Clicking the link will prompt you to download and install the shortcut on your system. You should only need to do this once, so long as your devices are all on the same iCloud account.

In the shortcut setup, you’ll need to specify which journal in Day One you want to use for your book entries. It defaults to Journal, but I recommend you create a new journal for your books and update the shortcut to save your entries there.

When you run the shortcut the first time, you’ll be prompted for permission to access Google’s API service, Google Books, and to save entries to Day One.

You’ll be asked for the book’s title and author for each book. Enter these carefully, as whatever you type will be used to search Google and Goodreads and will become the basis for your book note. Next, you’ll click through standardized prompts for book genre, reading format, ownership, rating, and a calendar to select the date you finished the book. Finally, you’ll be presented with a selection of book covers from the Google Books API service. From there, the shortcut finalizes the book note and creates it in Day One.

You’ll need to revise the genre categories to fit your reading preferences. You won’t need any shortcut programming knowledge to edit these. Right-click the shortcut on Mac or tap the three dots in the upper right corner of the shortcut on your iPhone or iPad, and look for this list:

The Shortcut applies a reading and rating tag to each book in Day One. This lets you quickly filter your entries to books you loved (or hated). You can change or eliminate this tagging system by editing the final action in the shortcut.

Shortcut Limitations

There are a few limitations with the shortcut. First, Goodreads discontinued its API access to their books database, so the link takes you to a search page where your book should be near the top of the list. It’s a two-click process to access the Goodreads page for your book note entry. You can edit the Goodreads link with the actual website URL after the fact if desired.

I did not include links to StoryGraph or Readwise as these are less common reading applications. If you use these or others, you can follow the logic in the shortcut to add these services.

Covers aren’t available for every book using the Google Books API. If the shortcut doesn’t provide the correct cover, you can add it manually by dragging it into Day One from Goodreads. Further, Day One doesn’t support image resizing, so the book cover can’t be reduced to the typical thumbnail size you’d expect. I’ve inserted the book cover at the end of the note to avoid overwhelming the entry. This approach yields a nice thumbnail view in the timeline and media views.

This shortcut creates a book journal in Day One. If you use a different journaling or notes app that supports Apple Shortcuts (like Apple Notes or Bear), you could replace the last action in the shortcut with the destination app of your choice.

Feel free to customize the shortcut as needed. If something isn’t working as you expected, leave me a note in the comment section, and I’ll have a look.

Final Thoughts

I’ve been a reader all my life, but it’s only been the last eight years that I’ve taken the time to track the books I’ve read. This started as a simple list in a notebook to track my reading against a goal. Eventually, it grew to a full-on reading system in Bear, which involves linking and back-linking my notes and quotes to central themes and other related books.

Taking these extra steps to process what I’ve read has dramatically impacted my reading retention. The books I read before this feel shadowy, almost non-existent; the books since feel alive and connected. Could simply writing stuff down make such a difference? Oh yes.

I wish I could go back in time and tell my 20-something self to take those 20 minutes after finishing a book to capture my thoughts. Fancy note-taking technology didn’t exist then, but it wouldn’t have mattered. I’ve always kept a journal, and it would have been a simple thing to write a paragraph or two about each book.

When I look critically at how elaborate my reading system has become, I know I’m overdoing things. There’s Readwise for highlights, Obsidian to download those highlights, Bear for my linked and tagged reading notes, and Day One for my reading journal. I spend a fair amount of time keeping these systems in check.

If I were to pare this down to the barest of essentials, I would use just Day One. If I could add just one more complication, it would be Readwise. A reading journal in Day One and a commonplace book in Readwise represent the two main pillars of scholarly reading that has spanned many centuries, albeit with recent technological improvements.

One example is the ability to “chat” with your highlights in Readwise using AI. These interactions have revealed connections and insights I had never considered, drawn instantly from the thousands of collected highlights in my system. The results are astonishingly personal and … brilliant.

This technology feels much closer to the “second brain” promises of connected notes apps. Why spend so much effort linking notes in Bear when Readwise reveals connections I wouldn’t have made on my own, all without any extra effort?

While I can’t go back in time to urge my younger self to keep a reading journal, I can pass this advice on to you. Track the books you read in a journal. Use Day One and this shortcut. Save passages in books that speak to you. Revisit and review these reading notes and quotes. Let this wisdom grow like interest on an investment. Your future self will thank you.