AutoJournal plugin for Notion

AutoJournal, née TaskCatcher

I started working on TaskCatcher to help myself juggle all the spinning plates in my life. I'd just recently consolidated a mix of Obsidian, Google Keep, and sticky notes down to using Notion. I really liked the pre-built Journal template, but I noticed that unless I was very careful about my journaling habits, it was easy to lose track of tasks that I didn't finish.

To combat this, I very, very quickly built a plugin using the Notion API, Node.js, and Google Actions. It took about 2 hours, all told, to start picking up incomplete tasks from my journal entries and dumping them in a database. However, it required a lot of manual setup (copying page IDs, etc). I realized that if I ever wanted anyone else to get use out of it, I would need to expand the offering a bit. So, instead of requiring users to already have a journal, I decided to just create the journal *and* track the tasks within. As a side benefit, it also helped me eliminate the annoying task of creating my own journal entry every day.

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Going Public

Using Netlify, I was able to pretty quickly get up and running with an Oauth solution that would allow other people to use AutoJournal. Toss in a nifty HTML template from Pixelarity, and baby you've got a stew going.

Oauth can be a bit of a pain unless you're used to it, but the docs from all the tools I'm using have been great, and I have a special 💖 place in my heart for engineers who can write.

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The Future

In the future, I plan to make AutoJournal more configurable (what format should the titles of journal entries be? should tasks carry over from day to day? what time of morning should everything run?) and introduce a one-time payment system for anyone after my "beta" period is over. Something reasonable, like $10 for a lifetime license to help pay for the cost of hosting and cloud compute. To be honest, if even one person paid for something I made in my free time, I'd be a happy boy.