#22

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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#23

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:

obsidian-daily-inspiration
obsidian-daily-inspiration1183×1035 194 KB

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:

3 Likes
#24

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:

8 Likes
#25

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!

1 Like