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.