How are you using Daily Notes?

I use my daily notes as a catch all record of my day, but with a concentration on work activities. I use the daily note plugin to provide time stamp as the name. I have a text expander snippet to to add the previous days date with cursor positioned to finish the link to that daily note. I then add today’s not link to the previous day note for navigation purposes through daily notes (I got this idea on the forums but forgot who suggested that. Apologies for not remembering and giving credit where credit is do). The text expander snippet also adds a #dailynote and #process tab. #dailynote is for categorization and the #process signifies that I need to come back (usually weekly review) and process this note.

The next major use is for work meetings. I have a text expander snippet to set up a meeting header and formatting for placement of my first meeting. I then fill out my meetings for the day with title and time in header. Notes are taking below with appropriate keywords/link added throughout the note. I do have some meetings which are more in-depth that require a lot of note taking for capturing new materials or presentation items. Those are linked out from this daily note to its on note and tagged as a meeting and a #process tag, but operates sort of as a literature note to be processed at a later time.

I also, utilize a #todo to items that need to be tasked out in my task manager, either MSFT ToDo or Azure DevOps. These can be processed during processing period or individually as I see fit. I use the block reference to the #todo tag location and save it to the task. That way if I need to navigate to the original mention of the task I can go to that location by searching the unique id.

The second area, outside of my work notes, is the Activities section. This is where I capture important knowledge base items I do throughout the day. Books or articles being read, YouTube videos watched, work items being performed. These serve mainly as just activity captures. If I want to fully process and dive in-depth on something I make a literature note. I just make the item listed as a link and click to make note. I have a TextExpander that fills out metadata that I want to add and then proceed as with any literature note. I also will make permanent notes from either of the two main buckets on the daily note also.

So, that is my use and processes for the daily note. I don’t have a full fledged zettelkasten setup as one can see from the above. However, it is a more hybrid system. This has all been made possible by #obsidian. I love this tool and its functionality. It really help consolidate and streamline my workflows.

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Daily Notes + Block IDs could be useful for creating “Fleeting Notes” or notes that you take for any content you want to be reminded in future.

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Couple additional thoughts on this for those following along -

  • If you’re looking for a TextExpander utility on Windows that’s Open Source to try this out, I’ve tested out a few and Beeftext works really well.
  • I have started doing templates for my daily page and meetings using text expansion after reading Jeff’s usage. I haven’t used block tags yet, but I’m a relative noob.
  • Rather than a tag for todo, I use [ ] (per markdown spec) - you can surface those through a shared search ("[ ]"), and I’ll apply metadata when I move them to a different task manager (Outlook or AzDO). So [X] means complete, [<-] means moved into a different task manager. It saves me from having to remove tasks and I can also search on completed tasks, or migrated tasks.
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I like your idea for the arrow in the [ ] to signify an action on that task. I remove the #ToDo tag and have not knowledge it was even a task or not. Will implement that. Thanks.

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When I do “Insert template” command, the {{date}} placeholder is replaced with the actual date, but this doesn’t happen when the daily note is created when clicking “Open today’s note”. Is there any way around that?

The daily note template needs the exact format specified for some reason, if you add the placeholder in your daily note template like this it will work:

After changing my daily note template for the millionth time, I simply leave it as a blank page — no friction, no pressure.

I begin my day by reading the lectionary and the saints of the day. This almost always inspires the creation of a note that, while it may not be permanent, is more substantive than a daily or fleeting note.

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I’m still in the experimental phase of figuring out my Obsidian. I’m trying to use my Daily Note as a Journal and a catchall.

When I’m researching or going about just daily work, if I don’t want to figure out how to format a note or where this information goes or how it fits somewhere. I just open a daily note, create headings, and take notes. At the end of the day or week (if super busy), I’ll go back through my daily notes and either embed (which is why heading are helpful so I don’t have to link each paragraph) or just straight up cut and paste sections from a daily note into a topic or source note.

I am trying this for a few reasons.

  1. To maintain flow while working
  2. It lets me review notes later when sorting out the daily notes. I can usually see the bigger picture at the end or the day or week. Or even just after I have finished the video, podcast, article… It is easier to see what is important.
  3. I can see personal progress and what I learned every day while still sorting information into topic categories.
  4. I’m more likely to “correctly” format a note and link it if my main task at the moment is to cleanup Vault. When my main task is learning, I don’t focus on the format of a note or how I should be linking. My main goal with formatting, linking, putting in keywords, and tags is to be able to find this note later either on purpose or accidentally.
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I use a synced todo.txt on my smartphone, laptop and desktop, so no need for replicating my To-Dos in the Daily Notes. I’m also not much of a journal or diary writer.

That said, I haven’t yet found my real use of Daily Notes, but I love some unexpected inspiration for my writing in the mornings.

So I use the templater plugin and a Daily Notes template to give me local weather, a random Unsplash image and a quote of the day as an inspiration, and immediately put my thoughts below it, which later might become actual notes.

I also put other stuff in it that comes to mind (like watch a video, read a book, work on xy).

So my »inspirational morning note« might look like this:

In case anyone wants to experiment, here’s my current Daily Notes template:

# {{tp_date}}

{{weather}}

### Inspiration

{{tp_random_picture:size=1920x1080}}

{{tp_daily_quote}}

#### Thoughts

{{tp_cursor}}

and here the code for the internal template {{weather}} I use with Templater:

curl "wttr.in/?format=3"

Other weather formats are possible (help).

This may not be the most »productivity-boosting« setup for Daily Notes, but at least it gives me a nice inspirational kickoff every morning. :slight_smile:

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I’m using obsidian since the beginning of the but my daily note system is going since 3-4 years now. I used it previously in a self-hosted wiki.

My main ideas are:

  • Use a single daily note to capture 2 things
    • List of 50min / 10min pomodoro cycles with a very informal description of what I did
    • Remaining daily notes
  • Have a weekly note to make a short summary of last weeks events at the beginning of next week to connect to the topics and continue the train of thought
  • Create a quarterly note in advance to sketch out my plans for the next ~12 weeks. Contains a list of all weeks in that quarter (links to weekly summaries) with a check-mark list of all goals for that week

The system works well if you can establish the habit of weekly reviews and planing the next quarter once you finish the current one. It’s not as much work as it sounds and is really useful to keep things aligned and go in a intended direction.

My daily note template looks like this:

#CaptainsLog, {{date:YYYY-MM-DD}}, week [[{{date:YYYY}}-W{{date:WW}}]]

### Logbook
1. 

It is automatically create with the date (e.g. 2021-03-09) and also linking the parent week (e.g. 2021-W10).
The quarterly note is a bit more manual work, but you only have to do it every 3 months.
I want to look up the dates for completeness and think a bit about my goals for that time period. I cross out weeks that passed and move around weekly goals as things progress.
A 2021-Q1 note could look like this:

tags: #CaptainsLog #12WeekYear

## 2021-Q1

### Goals
- Learn to program in python

### Weeks
- ~~[[2021-W01]] from 2021-01-04 to 2021-01-10~~
    - [x] program hello world example
    - [ ] write own library
- [[2021-W02]] from 2021-01-11 to 2021-01-17
    - [ ] write own library
...

By the way, the resulting graph is beautiful. :slight_smile:

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This is such a fresh and inspiring approach to Daily Notes. You’ve motivated me to build something personal around these topics. Thanks so much, @Moonbase59!

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Hi,

Can you explain how you implement {{weather}} in a daily note.

Do I need a plugin for this?

New user, so bear with me.

I use the Weather Fetcher Plugin GitHub - fyears/weather-fetcher but it requires manual action to insert in daily note …

Follow this thread Daily weather and next day forecast in a template - #11 by ninjineer for my struggles to get this to work from a template. :slight_smile:

How to you input the weather on note creation? I didnt get this part above.
Thanks.

Why aren’t people bringing in entries from Google Calendar to comment on?

I’m a Obsidian newbie but I’m finding that I have no headings or template for daily notes, instead I use it as place to put whatever coms up, as it comes up.

This helps avoid getting stuck wondering if it should go in a new note, or be added to an existing one, what to call it etc.

I find using bullets helps me fold and indent content, becuase, well I’m a former workflowy user. I also give most dot points a timestamp to avoid confusion about the order I’m addting things to the daily note. Finally, when adding content to other notes, I’ll add in a link to the daily note as well.

Then I link like mad, and to try and ensure each bullet point can pretty much explain itself on it’s own, so that when I’m looking at a note, I can easily see all the times I’lve refered to it in any daily notes and find whatever I’m looking for, or get a bunch of useful contextual information.

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I use Daily Notes less as a scratchpad and more as a tool to ‘ground’ myself each morning.
Opening today’s note is part of my morning routine, and I use it to journal, review notes I want to read each morning - goals, prayers, etc - and track my morning routine items as I get them done.

Here’s a screenshot of my template:

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The automation process I presented in this post should contain the steps you need. (There’s quite a bit more there than that, but I think the elements you’re looking for are there—including, perhaps, the edit at the bottom.)

Hello @KevinR

Most if not all of my notes begin in daily notes. each daily note is linked to a weekly note, each weekly note to a monthly and then a yearly reflection note. So now each week, month etc I already have and only have the relevant dates attached to the back links of the parent note. So for example this weeks weekly note will have 7 days worth of daily notes for me to then reflect and review. When I get to the end of the month that notes will contain only the weekly reviews this way I can atomatize my year in summaries. It works out really great in keeping both my backlinks less cluttered and also allows me to remove the daily notes from my graph but importantly also as my vault grows I can then remove the weekly notes and so forth. This method also visually reminds me to review my week, month and year much easier. With the help of the "Open Gate " plugin I can also have all my other apps open in my right menu thus I am able to work in my daily note with everything or most things I need instantly viewable from Todoist, to Google Photos, Otter, Drive etc

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