Apple’s Journal is a great way to keep a journal. With the release of OS 26, Journal is available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Although Journal is well integrated in the system, and supports the system share sheet, it does not support some of the common methods through which Drafts integrates with other app, such as URL schemes. It does, however, provide Shortcuts integration. By combining a simple shortcut with a Drafts action, it is easy to create journal entries from drafts. This tip covers a basic setup to do that.
The “Send to Journal” Action
The “Send to Journal” example action, when used in combination with the “Send to Journal” shortcut (both linked below), takes the current draft and creates a journal entry with the first line of the draft as the title, and body as the content. Any Markdown in your draft will be converted to rich text. It will also be posted to your journal on the original creation date of the draft – so if you come back later to a draft to send it, it will be posted to the right date.
Write a journal entry in Drafts, using the first line as the title, and the remaining text as your entry.
Run the “Send to Journal” action you installed above.
(You may get some permissions prompts to agree to the first time running it – just “always allow” to not seem them again in the future)
Open the Journal app, and confirm your entry.
Customization
This example works as-is, but can also be customized once installed. You can, for example, edit the “Create Entry” step in the shortcut to target a specific journal in the Journals app. Please ask below if you need assistance making any modifications.
Thank you for this tip (which I just forgot because it’s so easy and flexible to create what you need in Draft by yourself). I will have a look at Apple Journal and may be switch to using that instead of my own.
I’m not sure if I missed something more I needed to do but had some issues.
Apple Journal crashes on repeated use of this workflow (hangs on 2:nd or 3:rd try, on Tahoe 26.2, MBP M2 Max, Journal 2.0, Swedish localization—even though restarting it shows the draft has been sent correctly).
I included a permalink to the draft in markdown format that shows up as expected RTF but doesnt link back to my draft. (That may not be necessary since the information is already in Journal but even a link back to this forum TIP: Creating Entries in Apple Journal - Tips & Tricks - Drafts Community did not work.)
Entries for my Simple List items renders with two bullet points.
Also, I need a little more granularity for the dates in order to calculate time intervals between events. This may be to stretch Apple Journal too far but I’m puzzled why it is not as easy to see datetimes as in Drafts. For some entries it may even be critical if you need to use them for any kind of detailed report, anamnesis, accounting, accidents etc.!
So, thanks for creating this option and informing me, I will keep looking back to see if I can solve the issues or work them out in any other way. This said, it now amazes me even more how well designed and though out Draft is No wonder it’s the app of the year!
Interestingly ChatGPT Atlas recommends Drafts:
If time-of-day matters at all (research, logging, audit, later analysis):
Use Drafts (or similar) as the primary capture tool
Why Apple does this (important)
Journal is designed as:
Reflective
Narrative
Non-quantified
Apple explicitly avoids:
time pressure
surveillance affordances
audit-style metadata
This aligns with:
Screen Time constraints
Health data abstractions
Mindfulness design principles
In other words: Journal is intentionally not a log.
No wonder it’s the app of the year!