--- Title: > Update: Writing Down What I Do Subtitle: Making better use of Bear’s “Archive” functionality. Date: 2019-07-29 19:25 Category: blog Tags: [productivity, pomodoro, getting things done] Summary: > I’m still writing down the things I do every day, but I’ve made a small tweak—making better use of Bear’s “Archive” functionality. --- [Assumed Audience][aa]: people already persuaded of the value—at least to some extent—of "getting things done" strategies and having an idea of what you accomplished over the course of the year. [aa]: https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html A few months ago, I described [my current workflow][prev] for tracking what I do every day, using [Bear]. I’m still doing that, but I’ve made one small tweak that makes for a *much* nicer experience, and I figured I’d write that up for anyone else who’s thinking about using Bear in a similar way. The main pain point I’d had using Bear as a daily logging app is that I *also* use it for [my general note-taking][Zettelkasten], and I increasingly found that my pomodoro logs ended up mostly being *clutter* in my overall list of notes. I also realized that I don’t look at, say, my daily logs past the end of a week, weekly logs past the end of the month, and so on. However, I *do* like keeping them around through at least the end of my performance review cycle in case I want to drill down into more details about a particular task or accomplishment. I wasn’t really sure how to enjoy both long-term access and shoretr-term eliminating of clutter. Then I noticed that Bear has an Archive function:  Archiving removes your notes from your normal list view and makes them non-editable. However, they remain searchable in your library and wiki-style navigation links, like `[[2019.07.21]]`, still work. This is *exactly* what I wanted. Once I discovered this, I made one very small tweak to my previous flow: whenever I do the work of summarizing a given time-span, I simply archive all the notes at the level below that. So, for example, after copying the daily summaries into a week and summarizing that week, I simply archive all the day entries. Any given set of logs only ever has a handful of notes in it—at most 12, in the case of my year-level log. This made the already-great experience of using Bear for this kind of logging that much better. Again: I commend it to you! [prev]: https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/just-write-down-what-you-do.html [Bear]: https://bear.app [Zettelkasten]: https://v4.chriskrycho.com/zettelkasten/