Read this when: something is written down for the day, or a task has to go on a list.
The journal takes anything you want to write down and keeps it in your own words, unchanged. One entry per day, named by its date.
The journal is your own writing space. One entry per day, named by its date, and the photo from that day, the voice memo and the note sit in it together. The point of a capture companion is to lower the friction of getting a thought out of the head and into the space, not to make the user learn a notation first. So capture takes whatever the user throws in and writes it down in the user's own words.
That matters most when the input is long and unshaped. A voice memo run through speech-to-text can arrive as several paragraphs of stream-of-consciousness. The wrong move is to chop it into a task here, an event there, a feeling below, that reshaping loses the thread and imposes a structure the user never asked for. The right move is to lay the text down as it came, intact, and only then look at what follows from it.
This is the same rule the rest of the space runs on: imported material keeps its text exactly as it was, and only the fields around it are filled in. Capture extends that to the day.
And nothing is ever taken out of an entry. The photo from the bike ride belongs to the day, not to a sports folder; "was at the gym" stays in the day it happened. When a day turns into a subject of its own, the subject is created in addition and the day keeps its things and gains a pointer. Where the two ever disagree, the day wins, because the day is what actually happened.
Once the raw input is safely in the note, capture looks at consequences, but handles them beside the text, not inside it:
- A mood you mentioned is also recorded in one of the note's own fields, so it stays readable in your text and usable later for a look back across the month. Your sentence is not rewritten into some special notation.
- People, organisations and subjects that already exist in your space are offered as links, so the note connects itself without you filing anything.
None of this edits the words the user gave. The body is theirs.
When a mention clearly names a real person or organisation you will come back to, a short contact entry is created so the link works and later mentions gather in one place. When the mention is a fragment or ambiguous, you are asked rather than having something created. A daily note naturally drops names that never come back, and creating an entry for each would fill your contacts with empty shells. The signal that a transient name deserves its own file is that it keeps coming back, recurrence across days, surfaced as a repeated hint, is what prompts promotion. An import is less hesitant, because there you deliberately chose to file something; a daily note stays light.
There is one entry per day, named by its date. There are no weekly, monthly or yearly notes, and nothing writes a review into them: a month is thirty short files and reads in a second, so a summary over any stretch is a question you ask when you want it, in the words and at the length you want, rather than a file somebody has to keep true. Nothing is ever written into an entry unless you asked for it.
Links are offered rather than made for you, so the connections grow two ways. Your notes are indexed either way, so a thought is findable by its content even with no link at all. And at each session start Zanmai lists what it noticed: contacts and subjects your recent notes name as plain text without linking to them, ordered by how often they recur. A name mentioned once is a passing note; a name that keeps coming back is the signal that it belongs connected. You are offered the connection: from now on by default, and back into an older note only if you explicitly say so, since those entries are meant to stay as written. The result is that your daily notes become a record of what currently occupies you, connected to the rest as patterns emerge rather than on first mention.
Say "put that on my list" and it goes on one. There are two places and the difference is simple. Something that belongs to a matter you already keep here goes into that bundle, beside the material it is about. Everything else, the haircut to book, the tablets at nine, the thing somebody mentioned in passing, goes into life/task.md. One plain file, open it in any editor, sort it, tick things off, delete lines. Asking for something to be ticked off works the same way. Tasks are yours in the sense that matters: you decide what is on the list, not who types the line.
What Zanmai never does is invent one. A reminder to itself, an obligation it worked out from a document you gave it, a leftover from a test: none of those become a task of yours. They used to, and then they were read back to you at the next session start as your own open points, which is worse than useless. Zanmai's own open work sits in its own list now, out of your folders.
Where something has a real deadline, it can carry a date. The date decides when it surfaces, not where it is kept: a reminder for next August sits on your list like everything else and appears when the day comes near, instead of creating an entry in a journal year nobody has reached yet. Dated items are found wherever they sit, archive/ included, and the ones falling due within the next two weeks are named at the start of a session, overdue ones first. That last part is deliberate: a deadline does not stop being one because the trip or the project it belonged to was filed away. Only dated items appear there. A list of everything still open is read once and skipped from then on, and then the one line that mattered is lost in it.
Say a trip is cancelled, or a piece of work is over, and the trip is not the only thing affected. The flight, the hotel and the camera bought for it all hang off that decision, and none of them is named on the trip's own page: they point at it, not the other way round.
So closing something stops once. Before the status is set, you get a short list of what hangs off it, in both directions and two steps out, each with its own open lines, and one question: which of these should be closed or changed as well. Nothing on that list is touched by the change itself. A cancelled trip does not cancel the camera; it only raises the question, and you answer it.
Where nothing hangs off it, there is no list and no question, and it closes straight away.
Not a place for metrics. Food, sleep and workout numbers do not get sections invented for them in your day; those belong to their own subject, and what is worked out from a day always points back at it. Not a filing system either: when something you mentioned grows into a subject of its own, that becomes a proper filing job with a plan you approve. What stays is the point of it: the fastest way to get a thought out of your head and into the space, in your own words.
- Speaking instead of typing, where a spoken entry comes from
- People and organisations, how a name in an entry becomes a contact