Keep a Book Journal with Day One and Apple Shortcuts

• Reading • 14 Comments

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.

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These Vagabond Shoes

• Personal Essay, Travel • 6 Comments

We are sitting on a bench in Madison Square Park in the Flatiron District. Buildings encircle this urban oasis, framed by a blue New York sky. It is our last day in the city, and we have been walking all morning. Small dogs in fancy coats trot by us with their owners. The din of the city is somehow a comfort, like ocean surf. The temperature hovers around 30 degrees Fahrenheit, yet I feel warm in the sunlight, layered as I am in cold weather gear. Lisa sits beside me, taking it all in.

“Would you ever think of moving here permanently?” I ask. It’s a common question we pose when we travel.

“Oh, yeah,” she says without any hesitation. “I’ve always been a city girl.” Her face glows in the chilly air.

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Reflections on Reading The Story of Civilization

• Reading • 13 Comments

This month, I finished a multi-year reading of Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization, an eleven-volume opus considered one of the finest narratives of world history ever written.

Durant published the first volume in 1935 when he had just turned 50. The tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1968. Will and Ariel, his spouse and co-author, published the final volume in 1975, a culmination of forty years of writing and scholarship. No author’s body of work has even come close to the scope and duration of this epic history set. Excluding reference notes, the text spans ten thousand pages, covering human civilization from the earliest recorded history through Napoleon’s meteoric rise and fall. …

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Elevate Your Online Reading with Matter

• Reading, Technology • 4 Comments

I love the idea of a read-it-later app. The premise is simple: Save articles and blog posts that arise throughout the day with a single tap and read them later when you have the time. This way, you stay focused and never worry about misplacing or forgetting an important article.

A good read-it-later app can transform almost any web article into a clean, ad-free format with a consistent layout and font. It organizes newsletter subscriptions without clogging email inboxes. The best ones allow highlighting and annotations that carry over to popular note-taking apps.

The biggest problem with read-it-later apps is that saving articles is too easy. All those well-intentioned essays and posts languish in your queue, unread. You feel guilty about not reading them, so you archive everything and start over, only to repeat the process. And, maybe even worse, you end up reading the wrong articles.

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