Trying to be better about tracking my daily workload, I need a lightweight hotkey-based mechanism to quickly capture something as I switch tasks. I can then go back later and total up the times, or just jog my memory about what I was doing on a certain day at a certain time. Tracking this information in Evernote is also a bonus as it’s available and searchable on all my devices.
I created an AppleScript first that did the actions needed:
(* Notebook name to create these journal entries in *) property nb : "Daily Diary" (* BEGIN HANDLER CALL NOTE: I have added a new portion to the script so that users who aren't familiar with how to use a handler can run the Script directly and check it out. If you'd like to use this as a handler in your own AppleScript, Just delete or comment out the portion of code between "BEGIN HANDLER CALL" and "END HANDLER CALL" *) set notetext to text returned of (display dialog "Diary Entry" default answer "") my handle_string(notetext) on handle_string(notetext) if notetext is not "" then CreateDailyEvernote(notetext) end if end handle_string (* END HANDLER CALL *) on CreateDailyEvernote(txt) set t to "Daily Journal " & (do shell script "date +'%Y-%m-%d'") set crlf to (ASCII character 13) & (ASCII character 10) set timeStr to time string of (current date) (* keep track of the app that was running when we hit the hotkey *) set frontApp to (path to frontmost application as Unicode text) tell application "Evernote" set foundNotes to find notes "notebook:\"" & nb & "\"" & " intitle:\"" & t & "\"" set found to ((length of foundNotes) is not 0) if not found then set curnote to create note with text crlf & timeStr & ": " & txt & crlf title t notebook nb else repeat with curnote in foundNotes tell curnote to append text crlf & timeStr & ": " & txt & crlf end repeat end if activate end tell (* put the old foreground app back on top *) tell application frontApp to activate (* just to be sure there are no odd effects, explicitly hide Evernote *) tell application "System Events" set visible of process "Evernote" to false end tell end CreateDailyEvernote
and then set a QuickSilver trigger to run the script (I use Ctrl-Cmd-J — for “Journal”).
The effect is a simple plain-text list of entries.
This process is based mainly on the work done by Sonny Gill (“Creating a daily log in Evernote from Quicksilver“), but I took out the parts that write HTML into the note and deal with the clipboard as I don’t want either. I also added some AppleScript to put back the foreground app that was running when I hit the hotkey, in order to minimize the impact to my workflow. I don’t want to have to be clicking or using Cmd-Tab to try and get back to the app I was running before…