I don't remember when I actually started keeping a Daybook in Tinderbox, but I first wrote about Tinderbox as a Daybook in 2008. At some point in 2012 I ventured off into using Org-mode for everything so my Tinderbox Daybook languished. I've still maintained one each year, but entries were sparse. I rebooted the practice this year, and have been more consistently using my Tinderbox Daybook. Watching Dave talk about his new Tinderbox "Captain's Log" has inspired me to dust things off and make a go of it full time again. I may skip most of the automation for now, as that was never a sticking point for me, but what he's done may be tempting to emulate at some point.

One thing that came up in the video was the automatic tagging features in Tinderbox. It will parse each note's text for specific phrases and those can then be automatically set as "NLTags" or "NLNames". Here's a screenshot showing what happens after typing "Dave Rogers" in a note.

Tinderbox recognized I had written a person's name, and automatically tagged the note. In addition, I have several NLTags configured like so:

health: blood pressure; headache; migraine; doctor; prescription; sick
money: bought; ordered; sold; paid; purchased

What this does, for example, is cause Tinderbox to tag a note with "health" if I mention any of the list of words in the note. So if I mention that I had a headache, it is automatically tagged with "health". I then have agents that collect those notes so I can always see a handy list. The agent query is simple:

$NLTags.icontains("health") | $Tags.icontains("health");

This way the automatic tags work, but I can also manually add a "health" tag that will be swept up by the agent. There can be false positives this way, but it's close enough.

Tinderbox is pretty neat.