Approaching the end of the year, I tend to feel pretty melancholic and in the thoughts of nostalgia. Thinking about what happened in the year and how it compared to the previous years, and so on, and to remind myself to be grateful but also what to look out for next.
However, I’m quite a forgetful person, as such I tried my best to have a record to keep track of my days and memories in case I forget. I tried writing on a journal or printing out important photos, but in the end I feel it’s more practical to be able to record those things on the go with my phone that’s almost always by my side.
I’ve been trying out different apps and tools to help me out with this, and while I’m still experimenting what works best for me, these are some of the ones I do enjoy using.
Here’s a quick short video of the apps I will talk about here:
@devpotata Sharing cute apps to keep track of your days! #productivitytips #productivity #apps #digitaljournaling #dailybean #planning #penly #digitalplanner ♬ original sound – Devonazure
Dailybean
Dailybean is a cute and simple journal app to keep track of your days. It can be used as a moodtracker, but also to track other activities you want. It can be customized to have categories and icons to your liking.
How it works that each day you can pick a ‘bean’ to show your mood of the day – you can also purchase themes for other types of beans, such as cat-shaped ones or other colors.
You can then record other aspects of the day, such as weather, meals, hobbies, etc. There are some preset options but you can rename and switch the icons or names as you wish, which I like that I can personalize it to my needs.
For example, I don’t really care to record weather of a day, but I do care to keep track when I do certain activities like which days I do streaming or finish a commission, or which days I went out with my friends for special ocassions.
So for me a feature that is helpful is I can filter the days with the icons to find which dates have that activity (e.g. when and how often in this month did I stream?).
It can also save notes and images, though you’ll need the premium account to be able to add in more pictures. The app can also have a backup data via Google account.
Personally, I like the design of this app and find it easy to use. There are also additional analytics and statistics to show summary of each icon you can check for a more general overview.
Dailybean
Download: Android | iOS
Free with premium subscription plan
Penly
Despite having questionable handwriting that can confuse even myself as the writer, I do enjoy taking notes with handwriting as opposed to typing, especially when I need to make some quick notes or brainstorming something, or organizing a schedule while being able to see overview in a month or a week.
I like collecting actual physical journals especially ones with cute designs, and interest in looking on those neat bullet journaling spreads. Sadly, I do end up not using them most of the time because I had that feeling I don’t want to ‘ruin’ them so I tried to do this digitally instead.
I saw there are recommendations to use GoodNotes which is only available for iOS, and found Penly as the Android alternative which I tried out and found it nice so far.
The app works basically as a PDF editor, so we can edit the PDF with handwriting, typing, highlights, and adding images or ‘stickers’.
The app provides some preset blank journals such as the one above, with the tabs clickable to see and switch around different months, weeks, and views to other types of pages such as dotted or grid pages.
I use this app mostly to do planning of my schedule and personally having the cute visuals I can personalize easily help me to feel more engaged doing it.
Penly
Download: Android only (Paid)
(Extra) Journey
One of the other digital journal apps I tried and do quite take a liking of is Journey. It can record notes, photos, and tag them with your own categories. There is also the web app version.
For me, I like that you can see your calendar with pictures of each day, so I used it to mark each day with a memorable photo of something that happened on that day. This way I can see the month at a glance and go ‘oh, so that happened that day!’ – it’s pretty good for a nostalgia trip, haha.
For those who frequently travel, you can also have a map of locations of your photos.
It also has ‘Coach’ programs to help you with guided journaling ideas, and additional features such as plugins to connect to health, blogging, and other third-party services if you want further customization and functions.
Journey
Download: Android | iOS
Free with premium subscription plan
There are many more journaling and moodtracker apps out there with different features and design styles, so what works for me may be different for everyone else! I do feel interested to see how other people approach this, and to try out new methods that can be helpful and making it more efficient to keep track of daily life moments.
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