Daily Notes

Something I have found very useful over the last year is a notepad script I wrote, that creates me a new text file for each day I use it. Whether it be for little code snippets, notes taken whilst on the phone, interesting websites or whatever, the "Day Notes" shortcut on my taskbar is used alot.

I know there are many free note taking programs available but I like to keep things simple and they don't get much simplier than text files. So:

1) Create a directory where you want to keep your day note files. EG: C:\DayNotes

2) Create a text file called "DayNotes.cmd", edit it with notepad and paste in the following code and save.

@ECHO OFF

SET DAYNOTEHOME=C:\DayNotes

REM ------------------------
REM -- Set today variable

FOR /f "tokens=1,2,3 delims=/" %%A in ('echo %DATE%') DO SET TODAY=%%C-%%B-%%A.txt

IF NOT EXIST "%DAYNOTEHOME%\%TODAY%" (
ECHO %DATE% >> "%DAYNOTEHOME%\%TODAY%"
ECHO ========== >> "%DAYNOTEHOME%\%TODAY%"
)

START NOTEPAD.EXE "%DAYNOTEHOME%\%TODAY%"

3) If you want, create a shortcut and place it on your taskbar. Set the Run property to Minimized, so you don't get a command window flash up.

When you run the script it creates a text file in your day notes directory, EG: 2008-07-23.txt, if it doesn't already exist, so you can easily refer back to notes made that day.

If I can't remember when I had a particular telephone call or wrote some notes, out comes the windows search, which finds it quite quickly.


Daily Notes Script...Done.