Day One is probably my favorite app on my iOS devices and on my Mac. It is a wonderful little journal that is changing the way I think about my day and how I capture my thoughts. How is it doing this. Well here are a few ways.

The first, and most obvious, is that I am writing about my day, every day. It’s great. Deciding to have a daily journal makes me stop and think about my day and the things that went on. I capture little things that make me happy or that I think are important. I get notes about my kids, though I know I miss more than 70% of the cute things they say or do, but anything is better than nothing. I get notes about what we did and where we went. Sure, I leave stuff out, but capturing anything is better than nothing. It even let’s you have pictures, weather and geolocation data attached to your entries, so you can know more about what the day was like and what you were doing.

The second way it is helping me is as a safe place to put the thoughts that I might have been tempted to share on twitter or Facebook, but that are too boring, too personal, or to partisan. I don’t really want to share everything that comes to mind, but it don’t want to lose it either. And I don’t really want to get into any sort of political or philosophical arguments with people via social media. If I’m going to put my foot in my mouth, I prefer to do it with my civilized friends who will nicely handle the fact we disagree.

Don’t think that this will save you from my pictures of Legos, beer, or my perfectly roasted chickens. You’re stuck with them.

Third, I’ve implemented Slogger, a creation by the mad scripting scientist known as Brett Terpstra. Slogger let’s me capture my activities on various social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, Instapaper, pinboard and my own blog entries. All of my tweets, starred reads in Instapaper, photos and blog posts get captured and logged as apart of my day. This way I can review the events of my day and the things I’ve done in those services.

Fourth, I capture notes about my day at work. So I know what I did and the things that I found important or interesting. This helps me track how things in my professional life intersect with my private life.

I like Facebook for simple sharing with friends and family, but I still try to keep it simple there. I enjoy twitter, but always know it s public. Day One gives me a place to track my life in a private and contained way, and I love it.

I’ve look at other social networks, such as Path and EveryMe as ways to do a smaller, more private social network. But I think those miss the point a little. Facebook is a very effective way of keeping in touch with folks. Yes, it’s never as private as we would like, but as long as you keep that in mind and share what you wouldn’t mind if it got out, it can be really helpful. If something is private, then it should be private and shouldn’t be in a social network at all. That is where Day One comes in. Record it. Keep it. But don’t over share it.

By the way. I’m going to try to post more, so you might see stuff that isn’t as testing oriented. I still hope you will enjoy and read on.