Daily Notes VS Single Inbox

Knowledge management
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I noticed that there are a lot of people who are shifting towards a daily-note model, probably popularised by traditional journalling methods like Bullet Journal, traditional journalling, RoamResearch, and so on. My post is really to challenge this status quo.

I came from Roam, and I can vouch that daily-note-pages made it really easy to input things and they would all be date-tagged. I spent an entire year in that system, so this stance doesn’t come from inexperience. It also allows items sent to specific dates to resurface as backlinks.

My question however is…
Are we trying to plug in a traditional system into new technology?

The reason why people had to have daily notes is because they worked on pen-and-paper. You couldn’t just delete and move things around on paper pages. Therefore, you had to have separate pages for each date.

For example, in Bullet Journal, you would have to reference the previous day and copy over bullets that were not done. In traditional journals, we look back at what is not done/processed the previous days and try to work on them/schedule them in months.

I feel like it’s a backwards step.

Here are some cons of using daily-note-pages that I’ve felt came along only in retrospect:

  1. It produces an illusion of collection. It satisfies me when I think something I’ve put into a system will “never be lost”. However, it’s just a collector’s mentality. The truth isn’t about storage, the problem is about resurfaceability, integrability and useability. Most likely, if my thoughts were just left unprocessed, undeveloped, unintegrated, they would have a lot of friction in integrating with other ideas in the future.

  2. It creates a requirement to push backlogged things forward in time because things on daily note pages are susceptible to be “lost” in time. For me, I didn’t realise this was a strain until I started having a lot of backlogged work. I constantly required to bring things I couldn’t complete on today’s date to tomorrow. That constant, subtle urge to push things forward in fear of losing them with time was quite real for me. Not just tasks - even ideas, readings, things I’ve written about!

  3. It makes me feel like I am being productive when I actually am not. This was the big one because I would feel like I’m putting in a lot of information, in hope that someday when I chance upon the same topic, it would be readily available in form of a backlink and voila, serendipitous inspiration! Truth be told, as romantic as that sounds, it has only happened one time since the last year, and my database had become extremely huge with over 120,000 notes.

But what can we do instead? I’m not here to preach anything actually, because I have no idea what works the best. Instead I’m here to spur some discussion on whether a “single inbox” would be far superior to a daily-note-page habit.

Some pros would be:

  1. It forces you to “clean up” the clutter. We all hate cleaning up dirt. But if dirt remains in our PKM system, it can fuzz up the results and dilute its quality. Elimination and discarding is just as important as encoding. There is a reason why the brain was never meant to remember everything - and also I really don’t think it’s a good idea to remember everything. We only want to remember what matters.

  2. It doesn’t require you to keep pushing tasks/dates forwards in time. That friction has grown to be more obvious and painful the more I try to revert back to daily-note-pages after reverting to a single Inbox.

  3. It trades off “effort now” for “effort later”. I find that it has helped with a good habit of doing things now, keeping mental and productive hygiene, instead of procrastinating and postponing things for later.

What do you guys think? Would be interesting to hear your thoughts.

6 Likes
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Agree. If you use Daily Notes a s alog of what you did, related to what (like a Project), then they’re really a log and better kept all together adjacent to that project. I use daily notes and need to get better about moving log things to the correct project.

One other use of daily notes is to log what you did by day. As a consultant who tracks time by the hour, I go back over my daily notes when I’m putting in my time card.

The more traditional use of daily notes is real journaling, and they make sense, as-is, for that.

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Personally I do not manage my to-dos in Daily Notes or in Obsidian at all. But I do think that it is important to make the distinction between journalling vs. managing to-dos. I agree on the points you made regarding the psychological pressure it creates from having to keep postponing and having an unmanageable daily notes system.

I’d choose the single inbox option, as I have found myself to be uncomfortable in face of the fragmentation of the daily notes in its default form. It can be argued that its temporal feature is suitable to keep track of to-dos and going-ons, for me I would use other tools specialised for these purposes. Obsidian is not ideal to handle as activities IMO, it can, but not ideal.

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I don’t manage to-do’s in Obsidian, either, and I’m sure that influences my thinking here.

But I don’t separate most of my to-do’s daily in my paper planner, either, at least not in the planning stage. On my daily pages, I write appointments (anything that is explicitly designating as occurring ON THAT DAY), and very occasionally I might stick a sticky note with a task or two that, the morning of, I’ve decided are priorities for the day. I log what I actually DID do, and any other things I want to make note of (e.g. if a particular package arrived and I want that on record).

But my ongoing list of information, ideas, tasks that will need doing, etc. have always been kept separate from the daily calendar. I started out with a “long-term to-do list” and a “short-term to-do list” and, after reading David Allen’s book about 16 years ago, I switched to context-based task lists and a someday/maybe list (which I personally label the “back burner”).

My digital process works similarly.

On my computer desktop I have a folder called INBOX. That’s where I download EVERYTHING, and then I move it to where it needs to be (project, archives, etc.) later. This also prevents me from accidentally downloading something to wherever the PREVIOUS thing went and then never being able to find it again because it went somewhere that doesn’t make sense.

In Obsidian, I usually am able to label things right away. But if something needs to be started and left for later, if it’s a whole note’s worth, I put it in a folder called “Notes in Progress” and if it’s a quick bit of information, a date, etc. – something I have to deal with but I haven’t decided yet what I need to do with it or if it should be its own note, I jot it in a note in my top-level folder called “INBOX.”

(The same is true in my paper planner. Just inside the front I have a large sticky note – the 5x7 kind or whatever those large lined ones are – that serves as my “inbox.” The info can be transferred later as necessary, and when the sticky note is full [and the info is transferred] I can throw it away and put a new one in its place.)