I’ve kept a bullet journal for years. Pen, paper, the slow act of writing things down. I like the ritual of it, and I value the practice precisely because it’s analog and deliberate.
Which makes it awkward that I’ve stumbled into something that captures things my notebook never could. And I like it so much it’s creating a genuine tension with a practice I don’t want to give up.
Capture Throughout the Day
I use SR-7 as my capture tool. It’s a voice recorder I built, with automatic transcription, that runs on both my phone and desktop. I have a dedicated project set up for journaling. When something strikes me, I hit record. A reaction, a half-formed idea, a moment worth remembering. Thirty seconds or five minutes. Whatever the thought needs.
SR-7 transcribes each entry and generates a title and summary automatically. I don’t review them in real time. I don’t watch the words appear. The capture is the only thing I do. Everything after that is the machine’s job.
Because the bar is so low, I capture the small moments too. The ones that wouldn’t survive the filter of is this worth sitting down to write about.
Those small entries turn out to be the most valuable. The big events make it into any journal. It’s the texture between them that usually gets lost.
The Weekly Synthesis
SR-7 has an MCP server, which means I can use Claude Code to access my recordings directly. At the end of a week, I ask it to create an overview of the journal project.
The result is unlike anything I could write from memory. It has the detail of being there, because I was there, in the moment, when I recorded each entry. But it also has the coherence of distance, because AI can synthesize across dozens of fragments and find through-lines I wouldn’t notice on my own.
What I was excited about on Tuesday and had forgotten by Friday. The thing I mentioned three times without realizing it was bothering me. These summaries are comprehensive and digestible in a way that sits nicely alongside my bullet journal. A different lens on the same life.
Living Context
The recordings also become part of a broader context system that AI can draw from. Ideas captured in passing resurface when they’re relevant. A thought from three weeks ago connects to something I’m working on today. Not because I remembered it, but because the system held onto it.
My bullet journal is a practice. This is something else. A journal that builds itself, and that I can query, synthesize, and return to whenever I’m ready. Two different things. For now, I’m keeping both.