Replacing my digital journaling workflow with Tasker

I started using the Day One app a couple of months ago. I really appreciate its elegant interface, the clear separation of title and body text, automatic capture of metadata like location and weather, and its overall low-overhead feel.

That said, I didn’t love having yet another app just for journaling. I already use several tools to capture updates—micro.blog, Strava, and Obsidian—and I wanted to see if I could reduce some fragmentation.

I had a hypothesis: Obsidian could probably handle most of what I was using Day One for.

I tried it—and quickly ran into a few gaps:

• It took extra time to open Obsidian, navigate to my journal folder, and create a new note
• Opening Obsidian made it easy to get distracted by other notes
• Adding media was possible, but required a lot of extra taps
• Even with templates, I rarely added metadata because it was all manual

I don’t remember exactly how I stumbled onto the idea, but at some point it clicked: what if I built a streamlined capture interface that wrote directly into Obsidian?

Turns out Tasker is a great fit

I started with a simple proof of concept: pop a single text box, then write whatever I entered into my vault. That worked surprisingly well.

Next, I split the input so the first line became an H1 and everything else became body text—easy enough.

Then I added frontmatter:

• Date/time — straightforward once I matched the format
• Coordinates — trivial to grab directly from the device
• Weather — more interesting

Tasker handled the first two natively. Weather required calling an external API, but Tasker’s HTTP action made that pretty painless.

The final touch for v1 was a clickable notification that took me straight to the new note.

Making a v2

After a couple of weeks using v1, I added a few quality-of-life improvements:

• Option to add photos
• Option to change the captured date/time
• Option to set a different location

Initially, I was adding photos manually by opening the note (often via the notification) and attaching images there. It worked, but it took enough taps that I noticed I was attaching fewer photos overall. That felt like a real gap.

The date/time and location changes matter most for after-the-fact notes—like grabbing brunch and being present instead of pulling out my phone. I don’t want to change that behavior, but I do want to log it later.

Tasker already provides system dialogs for all of this: a photo picker, a date/time selector, and a map selector. With some trial and error, I wired them into my existing logic.

It works—and it feels good.

My biggest wish…

My biggest frustration with Tasker is that I can’t comfortably edit it on my laptop. As the task has grown—more actions, variables, and branching—the mobile-only IDE has started to feel unwieldy.

To be clear: I do like that I don’t need a computer, and that I can test everything immediately. That’s a real strength. But once things grow beyond a certain size, the ergonomics suffer.

To manage this, I started breaking functionality into sub-tasks—for GPS/map handling, weather, and date/time logic.

That’s helped a lot, though it’s also forced me to think more carefully about local vs. global variables.

Future updates

A few things I’m thinking about next:

• Improving GPS logic to recognize when I’m near common places (home, work, kids’ school, favorite spots) and store a named location instead of raw coordinates
• Using a calendar plugin in Obsidian to visualize journal entries more effectively
• Adding a home screen shortcut for quick journal capture

Overall, this has gotten me much closer to what I liked about Day One—without adding another app to my stack.