Hi everyone,
I’m an artist, and I’ve been developing a daily logging system for my own creative practice.
I found that a standard daily note or productivity template did not always reflect how an artist’s working life actually moves. Not every day is a studio day. Some days are spent making or researching, some are for applications, clients, and administration, some are for exhibitions or simply being outside, and some are quiet days at home when rest is the main need.
I gradually organized these different situations into Artist Daily Practice, a set of five Markdown templates:
- Creative Day — for making, experimenting, rehearsing, researching, or developing the work itself
- Business Day — for clients, applications, proposals, finances, administration, and career planning
- Outside Day — for exhibitions, meetings, travel, observation, errands, and cultural input
- Rest Day — for staying at home, recovering, having low energy, or deliberately stepping away from work
- Quick Daily Log — for mixed days or moments when a full reflection feels like too much
The templates are plain Markdown and do not require any plugin. They can be copied into an Obsidian Templates folder and adapted freely.
I also wanted them to work in two ways:
- You can fill in only a few relevant fields by hand.
- You can speak freely about the day and use the template—or an AI assistant—to organize the account afterward.
The purpose is not to complete every field or turn every experience into something productive. It is simply to preserve what happened, notice how a project or professional situation changed, and record a next step only when one is genuinely needed.
The project is free and open source under CC BY 4.0:
GitHub repository:
https://github.com/wenhui-code/artist-daily-practice
I would be very interested in feedback from other artists, freelancers, or people who use Obsidian to document a creative practice.
In particular:
- Do the five Day Types make sense to you?
- Would you use the short or detailed templates?
- Is there anything you would remove, simplify, or add?
Thanks for taking a look. I hope you can find it useful in your own creative practice！