Weekly Reviews: Things.app  Plaintext

I'm still using Things.app to handle the recurring checklists for rituals in my life: planning, review, etc.

Since I released my automated weekly review in Things, I have been recording a summary of the week in the Notes field of the generated Things Project.

As I work on building a more plaintext view of my life, I thought it would be cool to bring this into Obsidian, so that I could tie Weekly Review updates about projects to their development and completion.1

So I wrote some automation! First I backed up my wiki folder, (using git finally!) then I ran some test runs until I arrived at this:

(function() {
  let Things = Application("Things");
  app = Application.currentApplication()
  app.includeStandardAdditions = true

  Things.launch();
  for (proj of Things.projects().filter(p => p.tagNames().match(/Rituals/) && p.name().match(/Weekly/) && p.status() == 'completed')) {
    let d = proj.completionDate()
    let formatted_date = `${d.getFullYear()}-${((d.getMonth()+1).toString()).padStart(2, '0')}-${d.getDate().toString().padStart(2, '0')}`;
    let content = `## ${proj.name()} #rituals/weekly\n\n${proj.notes()}`
    app.doShellScript(`echo "${content}" > ~/Dropbox/wiki/weeklyreview/${formatted_date}.md`)
    app.doShellScript(`echo "\n- [[weeklyreview/${formatted_date}|Weekly Review]]" > ~/Dropbox/wiki/journal/${formatted_date}.md`)
  }
})();

It iterates through my completed projects, filters to projects that have a tag and a name structure, then yanks out their notes, shells out to write a file and appends a link to that file to a daily note.

I'm imagining a daily note as a sort of bullet journal, linking out to other notes. That's not how I wrote daily notes in the past… so I'm tempted to write more regexes to reformat… but I should probably just forgive myself and move on.


  1. I'm pretty excited about the possibility of a project being resurrected, and being able to find old decisions via unlinked mentions and searches. It's probably another step driving me towards org-mode. 


Changelog
  • 2022-06-08 11:31:29 -0500
    Rename articles

  • 2021-03-25 09:47:16 -0500
    Use unicode arrow

  • 2021-03-23 09:44:53 -0500
    fix missing period

  • 2021-03-23 09:44:28 -0500
    Fix footnote

  • 2021-03-23 09:04:47 -0500
    fix title

  • 2021-03-23 09:02:22 -0500
    post: things -> plaintext