CANVAS + Periodic Notes template for reviewing your month

[HeavenIdeas]

Hey everyone! I’ve just started experimenting with a way to use CANVAS to visualize my month.

I use Periodic Notes and have Daily, weekly, monthly and yearly notes. I use it mostly for work related stuff since there are tons of things to remember and millions of meetings… This is how I’ve structured the canvas.

The main idea is that this would be a template for each month. Where you have your Monthly note at center (In my case I’ve narrowed the scope to the Month Summary). Branching out from that you have the weekly notes for that month, also narrowed the scope to the Week Summary. And finally from those I branch out to each individual Daily note. Those I narrow the scope to the meeting log, since that is where I log everything that I do on the day.

The cool thing is that I think this is going to vastly improve how I author my week and month summaries, as I can have all the context of the month at a glance!

What do you think? I apologize in advance if someone has already had this idea but I thought it was quite a good use of the new CANVAS plugin. I’m really looking forward to quality of life improvements and other canvas specific plugins that help the creation of templates and things like that with CANVAS in mind! Anyway if anyone finds this interesting I’m happy to share my templates for daily/weekly/monthly/yearly notes as I’ve been refining them over a year and a half.

[thiagopod17]

Love this use man. A canvas template looks a better option than a markdown template to gather all your notes. Would you mind providing the md code template here. best,

[HeavenIdeas]

So at the moment I don’t think you can do a canvas template per se. I’ve just been using this and copy pasting to a new canvas. And then every day I’ll use the Swap File Function in canvas to grab that day’s note:

I’m pretty sure Canvas templates will be a thing, eiter by it’s own plugin or updates to the templater plugin eventually

[HongDaLiNi]

in my experience, to have all the context that is needed when writing a periodic note (daily/weekly/monthly/yearly) is very crucial:

• low-friction view of past periodic notes
• low-friction navigation among the past peri. notes

been searching for a solution to my workflow; using canvas is a good idea, i might test it out

but, I still hope the Periodic Notes to be incorporated as a core function of the application, and therefore, the aforementioned bullet points can be developed and added to perfect this core function.

[antulik]

I like idea of organising in a circle. However I can’t think of the best way to structure many notes like it. Even months with 5 weeks break the symmetry in the top post.

I’m trailing linear mode

You can find canvas here:

Daily Notes Organiser

Great idea @HeavenIdeas I added two canvas overviews. “2023 Canvas” has yearly and monthly overview: [image] “2023 Mega Canvas” has monthly + weekly + daily preview [image] Updated collection: 2023-01-30 Daily Notes Organiser 2022-2023.zip (302.3 KB)

[HeavenIdeas]

@antulik yes the circular organisation was more how it came out, but I agree it’s not ideal.

I’m planning on updating at the end of the week when I’ll have the full month of January.

I’ve already done some changes and linked the yearly template that I started which is much more linear.

The thing that’s been great so far is that I’ve been expanding the note in the canvas to show all the content from my daily log. And that had given me a lot more context of what I was doing past days and weeks.

Also since at the top of my list I have my tasks rolling over I’ve split that into its own note and then created 3 cards in canvas for upcoming tasks, due today and done today as a sort of a task dashboard.

Will update soon, but it’s nice to see what you’ve done!

[HeavenIdeas]

Learnings after first month

Here is how the final version of the month came out

(Can we take a moment to appreciate how cool it is to export the CANVAS as an image using the privacy mode! It looks incredible!)

After trying this for the first month here are some key findings

Extra Things that I added during the month

• A Task Dashboard
  • This was great and really made the canvas for the month a true mainstay throughout the day.
  • What I did is create a Note named Task Dashboard In there I made 5 headings:
    • Over Due
    • Due Today
    • No Due Date
    • Upcoming Tasks
    • Done Today
  • In the canvas I made a group and named it Task Dashboard in there I ended up with 3 cards:
    • Over Due
    • Due Today
    • Completed Today
  • Because the task queries used the today token the dashboard dynamically updated every day.
  • This meant that I didn’t need to rely on the task blocks in my daily notes anymore which meant that I rarely went into a daily note.

• Links to Year and next month Canvases.
• A TODAY red card that I used as a pointer to visually see which was today’s daily note

Positives

• I ended up resizing each daily note to display the full content at the end of the day which meant that I didn’t need to select the note and scroll to see a hidden bit. This was at the expense of aesthetics but it was well worth it as it became one of my favourite aspects of this workflow
• Having everything all together I found myself only opening the January 2023 canvas every day instead of my daily note. This allowed me to have the previous days notes ready at a glance, and that allowed me to start the day faster as I could see where I left off the previous days.
• Having the weekly and monthly note also available in the canvas allowed for adding the Weekly and Monthly Summaries as they were happening. So at the end of the week the summary was mostly done and I only needed to give it a once-over

Friction points

• Not being able to automate some aspects made updating the canvas a bit tedious.
  • I ended up doing it once every week. I would manually have to add that weeks notes one by one and manually narrow the scope of each note to the meeting log.
• I look forward to new CANVAS plugins that allow for templating or mult-selection actions to speed up these processes and make workflows that rely on structure and naming conventions using canvas, more robust.

Future ideas

As @antulik pointed out, the "Clock Design" that I posted in the original post isn’t perfect or ideal. With months that have 5 weeks the symmetry disappears and the layout isn’t too pretty.

It is true though that I felt quite free to structure the notes in this infinity canvas style and moving my today card as well as my Task Dashboard Group around made each week feel fresh and new.

At the end of the day the structure isn’t important to copy as you should use the structure that works for you

Final Thoughts

Like everything related with personal workflows this is how I’ve done it and it won’t work for most people, but I thought sharing my experience with it might help some people discover a new way to interact with your daily notes, and take full advantage of them.

Personally I loved working like this and will continue to do this for the next months since one thing that I lacked with the normal workflow of periodic notes is having the context of multiple notes ready at a glance, since I wasn’t a fan of having multiple tabs open with multiple daily notes.

(a bit later than I wanted but here is the full update)

[mzantsi]

Thanks for sharing that. I find Canvas particularly good for reviews such as an overview to check priorities for the beginning of the day.

What would be good is to have a Daily Note page in the canvas that showed today’s page. I can’t see a way of doing that, unless you’ve been able to.

[Tom_unseen]

That’s a noble reflection on your own system. Thanks for sharing that.

It’s great that you found something that works for you!

For me such a system would be currently too much work to maintain. I adore standard daily notes with the periodic notes and calendar plugin.

[HeavenIdeas]

It’s not a bad idea! Of the top of my head I could see making a note in your canvas with a dataview (most likely dataviewjs) to dynamically embed “today’s” daily note…

[HeavenIdeas]

Yes, this isn’t for everyone for sure. The one thing that I was missing with the traditional periodic notes workflow is keeping what I had done previous days or weeks in the front of my mind.

It’s easy when it’s tasks because it’s easy to bring them on from previous days. But for me the little nuggets of knowledge that you write each day were getting lost.

To be fair I hadn’t consistently gotten into the habit of doing weekly/monthly/yearly reviews until the end of 2022. Then when I did the whole year, week by week, month by month, I realised all these little things that I missed.

That’s why for me this way helps keep info right and center throughout the month and helps migrate those nuggets into weekly/monthly sumaries with less friction.

Anyway thanks for the kind words

[Alex_Valentine]

Hi,
This looks really useful but im just wondering how i would impliment this into my own obsidian? Im very new to this but would love to use this template!

[HeavenIdeas]

Hey @Alex_Valentine. I think what you can do initially is create a new Canvas, and start putting down cards (if you don’t already have set up all your daily/weekly/monthly notes set up)

You can use that to create a placeholder for each type of note: 5 daily connected to 1 weekly for example and so on and so forth until you have the whole month setup.

Once you have it organized you can save that as your “template”.

Then to start a month you can duplicate this template and rename it Month YEAR (or whatever you want)

when you start using it for that month you just need to right click on the card for each day and substitute it for that day’s daily note or weekly note.

Obviously you can do all of this at once, but since there will be loads of them initially, I found it is much more manageable to just do them, one week at a time when I start the week.

Hope this helps

[Huiming]

Thank you for sharing your great example of canvas. But I have a question that your linear arrangement of daily notes seems have little difference with Daily Note plugin.

[Huiming]

What an excellent sharing. Thanks a lot. Could you share more on your task dashboard? What is the task queries?

[HeavenIdeas]

Hi @Huiming I’m glad you found this interesting. The Task Dashboard queries are very simplistic:

Taks Overdue:

not done 
due before today

Tasks For Today:

not done
due today

and Tasks completed Today

done on today

Hope that helps.

[HeavenIdeas]

Mid-Year Update

I thought I’d do a midyear update to showcase the evolution of my process.

This is still the main way I interact with my daily notes during the day. And I’m still finding a lot of benefits to having all this information in one go.

Example of June 2023

This is what the canvas for June ended up looking like

Main Differences to last time

• Shifted to a linear layout of notes. This seemed to be one of the most upfront changes to do.
• Added new “Dashboards / Collections” for easy access of info

Breakdown of new additions and improvements

Top part of the canvas

This part of the canvas holds the bird’s eye view of the current month. It contains:

• Month’s most important files (directly embeded)
• Current Year Canvas
• Previous and Next Months Canvases
• Current Month Summary

This is meant to be the first thing you interact with when going back to a Month Canvas. So you can quickly see what was going on that Month.

Main Section of the canvas

This section’s idea remains pretty much the same as before, just that the layout has been changed to have each week in a linear layout.

It’s still extremely useful to be able to see the summary of each day at a glance. And getting back into the mindset in which you finished your work day with becomes really easy.

Update to main Dashboard

Each week still has it’s Weekly note with it’s summary, and all the daily notes for that week.

The biggest addition has been the expansion of the previous “Task Dashboard” into a “Month Dashboard” that displays all the relevant info that you want to check day-to-day. It’s components are now:

• Current Tickets: Jira page embedded that has a query of all the current open tickets that might be relevant to me
• Upcoming Holidays: Countdown to upcoming holidays. (these are done by creating metadata on the daily notes where I’m starting the holiday)
• Current Project Details: This has any relevant info that I need to keep track about the project that I’m in. Countdown to deadlines, up-to-date information, etc…
• Task Dashboard: This remains the same as how I had it set up before

Conclusion

Half a year in, I’m still convinced that this is the best way that I’ve found to interact with my daily notes and stay on top of things. Having all the info at a glance is useful on a daily basis and it has forced me to even write more things on a daily basis.

How I’m distilling what information to put on the daily notes

The process that I’ve ended up doing is that on a day I’ll write down relevant stuff like tasks, and such. But when it comes to knowledge base that was learnt that day or workflow ideas etc, those are written in relevant standalone notes and then those sections are embedded into the day that I came up with that.

This provides the best of both worlds, by being able to always have a backlink in the standalone notes to the daily note/ day that this info was created. Which then allows me to have the context of what was going on during that time when I created that knowledge in my vault.

End

I’d love to hear if people have been using similar methods to this one and how it’s been going for you.

[ethanio12345]

Love the look of it! I’m beginning my journey and pulling templates from everywhere to see what fits. Would you mind sharing the new template? Please and thanks.