#1

Hi, just finished my first ~24 hours on Obsidian (after going through countless other similar productivity/note-taking/PKM-y apps, including Roam, Notion, Bear, Agenda, Joplin, TiddlyWikis etc…) and I’m enjoying my experience so far.

There are features here and there that are missing and essential to my work (e.g. I’m a researcher, so integration with Zotero/ref managers is a killer feature for me), but Obsidian’s UX + team’s transparency and responsiveness makes me want to be a part of this app’s journey :slight_smile: (Huge props to Erica and Shida for your professionalism and overall customer service, by the way!)

Wanted to share my Daily Notes template, which features start- and end-of-day reflections, a place to put your schedule, and a work log. The focus of this template is to help one become more aware of how one is spending one’s day and how one is doing not just professionally but also with regards to mental health. Let me know what you think; all feedback is appreciated!

23 Likes
Daily & Weekly note templates (in progress)
#2

That’s awesome! I have been through a lot of apps too but this one is sticking. I dig the template, I just made mine yesterday.

This is what I have come up with, I like to look back on what I ate, drank, etc. so I used tags for those. Things I come across go in “things I found today” which include embedded tweets, new tools, etc. I imagine I’ll keep iterating on it for many years to come so it better suits my needs!

Todays Priorities

1 -
2 -
3 -

How are you?

Yesterday’s Notes

#ate:
#drank:
#slept:
#exercised:
#highlights:
#reflections:

Greatful For?

Today’s Thoughts

Things I found today

Thinking ahead
4 Likes
#3

I dynamically generate this kind of template in both “Preview” (at the outset of a day) and “Review” (at the end of a day) forms. I also have templates for weekly reviews and previews.

I have a markdown file of prompts and I use macros (Shortcuts on iOS, typically) to randomly choose a couple to discuss. The goal is to avoid making the reflection so repetitive that it becomes tedious.

I also use a shortcut to pull in the day’s meetings/calls/etc.

These aren’t in shareable form but I can try to polish them up if anyone is interested.

10 Likes
#4

I would be interested how that works!

Mainly (I am not familiar with iOs) how you set that up to “insert in a template” and what kind of templates you use.

If it is a lot of work to clean them up, maybe you could just describe them a little bit. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#5

Sure!

What I do is a little more complicated, but I’ve drafted a shortcut that should work for most people and should be easy to edit by anyone. All the prompts are in text boxes—edit and add new ones as you desire.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/5519b1d8045743d0bc4b48018d7d0bcc

It requires Shortcuts, which is built into modern iOS devices. When run, it generates a markdown-formatted reflection that will look something like this:

# Reflection for May 30, 2020 at 9:21 AM

## Gratitudes

### What are you looking forward to this week?
### What was the last great coffee or tea you had?

## Reflections

### Research
#### What are some events or deadlines for Research coming up in the near future?
#### What are some events or deadlines for Research coming up in the near future?

### Home
#### What are some events or deadlines for Home coming up in the near future?
#### What challenges should you be mindful of in Home today?

As you can see, it can sometimes randomly select the same prompt twice in a given section. I don’t mind this. The lists I use have enough prompts that this is rare, but if it does happen, I just delete the duplicate and cherish the saved time! The shortcut only has four, so you may want to add some more to reduce the chances of duplicate prompts.

The shortcut copies that reflection text to the clipboard. From there just paste it into your daily note, or wherever you’d like. With macOS/iOS Handoff, you can also paste it straight into Obsidian.

3 Likes
#6

Oh cool!

I am not on iOS so I cannot open the link and have a look at your Shortcuts.
But I would be interested to see them, would you mind posting them in a “non Shortcuts” form?

#7

Ah, sorry. Thought you were on iOS.

Exporting a Shortcut leads to a relatively useless and unreadable XML file if you aren’t using Shortcuts yourself. The best I can do is to show the logic through a preview:

https://preview.scpl.dev/?shortcut=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.icloud.com%2Fshortcuts%2F5519b1d8045743d0bc4b48018d7d0bcc

1 Like
#8

No worries. Thanks I got the gist of it.

1 Like
#9

Thank you for this! I’m a fairly heavy Shortcuts user, but I haven’t made anything for Obsidian yet. This will be a great starting point.

1 Like
#10

Super curious about the shortcut you use to pull in meetings/calls/etc. if it’s at all possible to clean it up for public sharing.

#11

I had thought this would require a bunch of work, but it turns out that I did it already. For once my past self did something right!

Try this:

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/56b04b2432cc454b90d679c630118262

Users will obviously have to edit the shortcut to specify the calendars they use.

It accepts a date as input. This allows you to run it for today, tomorrow, yesterday, etc., as part of other shortcuts. If it isn’t given one, it asks the user to specify a date.

It searches for events from 3am on the current day to the next day. I can’t recall why I did 3am… I think it was because I sometimes ran these late at night and didn’t want whatever I was currently doing to run over into the generated agenda.

It ends with a generated agenda of the format:

- (Start Date)-(End Date): (Title) ((Duration))
- (Start Date)-(End Date): (Title) ((Duration))
- (Start Date)-(End Date): (Title) ((Duration))

where each line is an event in the calendar.

It has been pretty robust for me, though I’m open to hearing issues and trying to debug if people run into any.

2 Likes
#12

I am interested, @ryanjamurphy. Thanks :facepunch:

#13

Interested in the Daily Notes shortcut? I posted it above already! Daily Notes Template

#14

This template is really awesome, thanks for sharing~

#15

@edge thanks for sharing this, the link is broken

https://gist.github.com/haydlite/e6fb3f88f34ec3e3218432cb0e9c512b

would love to check it out, if possible

#16

Managed to find it for you, think their username may have changed so just googled haydlite and github and hey presto…

2 Likes
#17

awesome @Dave_PR thanks for finding it!

1 Like
#18

Hey Guys, i am new to Obsidian. Been here for about 12 hours. I am very interested in Daily Note and Weekly note templates. I clicked the link on your post however it gets me to a 404 error. Could you perhaps reupdate it? Once more i am new to the community and basically to coding/linux and free softwares in general, thus please, if what i am asking is nonsense, please do tell me. Thanks again

1 Like
#20

@Lobster:

It’s a little late, but I wanted to share that I used @Dave_PR’s link from 11/20 today 2021/06/8, and I was able to download the template file without issue.

You could also search GitHub, as Dave describes and find it that way.