Sometimes people in the Discord ask for templates, and after my live notetaking session with Nick Milo a couple of people reached out privately with questions & asked me to expand on how I use obsidian for project / task management and habit tracking.
I figure it might ever come up again, so in the interests of having somewhere handy to link to, I wanted to put it all together here. To be clear, I am not doing anything particularly complex, but I think there’s value in showing how to not go more complicated than you need. Some people use stuff like dataview and or the GTD plugin for complex task management and habit trackers and I totally recommend that if you need something that complex.
I don’t, though, so my daily notes template looks like this:
# {{date}}
![[Tasking#Priority Tasking]]
## Minor Tasking
## Reading Log
## Accomplishments
## Gratitude
## Health
[ ] double-check with Josie about [[thing]] (under Minor Tasking)
Read article about thing which taught me this major takeaway and might be useful for [[something]]. (Reading Log)
Got done [[article]] for [[market]] (Accomplishments)
edited [[story]] based on [[edit letter]]. (Accomplishments)
“Minor Tasking” are basically notes-to-self for little things that I know I need to do but I’m on mobile so I can’t do them, or if I sit down at my computer and I know I have four things I want to accomplish that night. Anything more complicated or that I expect to be a “project” goes directly into my Tasking file.
At the end of each month I use this CLI javascript that I wrote (I’m working on turning it into a plugin!) to concatenate all of the subheadings into one file, so for example my daily notes will become a “January Reading Log” or “February Health” list and then I go through and review it, re-organizing the information, looking for trends, reflecting on what habits I managed to keep up with, etc… and making sure I didn’t forget anything important. The reading log then becomes something like this: Reading Roundup: Edible Entrails & Self-Fermenting Wine » Eleanor Konik (see also: how I integrate my reading log into my full knowledge management workflow) and any trends about my health get added to a relevant file in my 20/26 Medical folder.
I saw that you had links to the previous and next day in the header. Do you add those manually? How could one do that automatically (without a plugin?)?
But Templater didn’t (still doesn’t) work on mobile. Then I found out Calendar does work on mobile, so once mobile testing stabilized I started mostly using it, and since I often create my daily note on mobile first thing when I wake up and am thinking about my day, having a template that didn’t work was annoying, so I swapped back to just {{date}}
And I think literally yesterday @liam updated Calendar to work with the {{date+1}} style syntax, so I’ll probably update it to that again later because I do find being able to navigate without the side panel helpful.
To do it manually you would just use aliases, as above.
Calendar 1.5.8 added support for calculating the date. Examples:
{{yesterday}}
{{tomorrow}}
{{date-1d:YYYY-MM-DD}} // yesterday
{{date+2d:YYYY-MM-DD}} // in two days
{{date+1M:YYYY-MM-DD}} // next month
{{date+10y:YYYY-MM-DD}} // in 10 years
{{date +7d}} // use default format
Can you please elaborate about the date links? Does your template literally say [[{{Yesterday}}|<]] | {{tp_date}} | [[{{Tomorrow}}|>]] or are those placemarkers? I have the Calendar plugin but I’m not understanding how to make this work automatically.
Yeah, I copy and pasted directly from my vault’s daily notes template file. Is it not working for you? I admit I haven’t used that format since Obsidian mobile’s sidebar plugin thing got tweaked to make the calendar come up more easily.
This is a great idea!
