Automate your monthly journal with a Python script

May 8, 2026 I keep a monthly journal in Markdown; one file per month, each entry stamped with the date and time. For a while I was creating those files by hand. That got old fast. So I wrote a Python script to handle it and want to share it with you. Each time the script runs, it checks whether a journal file for the current month already exists. If it doesn't, it creates one with a header and the first date/time entry. If it does, it just appends a new timestamp so you're ready to write. The file is named by year and month — something like 2026-05 Monthly Journal.md — and it opens automatically in your editor when it's done. I run it from Keyboard Maestro with a hotkey, but it works just as well from Alfred or the command line. Any trigger that can run a script will do. To make it work for you, change two things: The JOURNAL_PATH near the bottom of the script is set to my journal directory. Point it at yours: JOURNAL_PATH = "/Users/yourname/path/to/journal" The script opens the file…