How do you approach Daily Notes and Journal notes?

Knowledge management
1

I noticed that some Obsidian users create distinct journal entries and daily notes. I’ve been using Daily One for a short while, and I’m thinking about just using Obsidian and markdown notes for this too.

For those of you who have distinct journals, and daily notes in Obsidian, how do you draw the distinction between the two use cases? What are your suggestions for maintaining this over time?

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2

I do it inside my daily notes:

Blah blah blah

---

## #journal 12:27
Making golden slices for the kids.

---

## Blah blah

It works perfectly for me.

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3

How do you differentiate between a journal entry and a daily note. Are journal entries exclusively personal notes?

4

I usually open obsidian in the ‘Daily’ note and start writing stuff. when there is a chunk of text that deserves a name, I can:

  • Generate a new note.
  • Merge the text into an existing note.

I always leave a link from the daily note to the created/modified note, so I can record more context that can be useful in the future. For example, a daily note sometimes can bring together notes I used for a project or events that happened in the same period of time.

I learned that ‘Time’, ‘People’, and ‘Places’ are important when taking notes.

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5

This is the template I use when ‘Refactoring’ notes

---
date created: '{{date}}'
---
refactored from: '[[{{title}}]]'

{{new_note_content}}
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6

I think they are the same?

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7

I think that is entirely up to you.

My journal is mostly personal stream of thought kind of stuff. Very rarely linked or edited.

My daily notes are often more bullet-pointed, and topical. I tend to link things from here, or break them into separate notes.

But those aren’t rules per se. Just broad tendencies.

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8

Yeah, the entries that I tag as #journal are essentially those that might start with “Dear diary,…” :sweat_smile:

However, everything else in my daily notes helps me get a clear idea of what was going on on a specific day or period. I link every note I create, I log my Google searches, some of my text messages, you name it.

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9

I use the daily notes for my personal journal and all other notes. I divide the page into 2. (Journal & Notes) thoughts, feelings, personal reflections, insights go to the top all practical literature. project notes etc go to the bottom on occasions these are expanded into a new note if lengthy. For deeper self therapy journalling i do this on a separate page 1 hour per week the same as a therapy session where I explore the key parts, questions or concerns raised in my daily journal.

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10

I just started using Daily Notes three days ago, and my plan is focus on more ideas, reading notes, project reflections, and the like. I’ve been keeping a Day One journal for maybe 11 years now, so I don’t want to abandon it. It has features not available in Obsidian. But I like the idea of using it more for non-personal daily notes in Obsidian. I really don’t want to use Obsidian for personal stuff liking keeping track of my sleep, what I ate, or how I’m feeling. I want to to be more process oriented. It’s like, what I write in Obsidian could be published online because it’s not that personal.

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11

I’m considering trapping information throughout the day on the Daily Notes page, then refactoring that of evening as part of a daily reflection process. I have a template based on How to keep a journal in Roam and will be using:

  • Stories from Today (bulleted list of 1-3 highlights from the day)
  • Today I learned (bulleted list of 1-3 things I learned and want to take note of)
  • Content I watched (list of movies, TV shows I want to track that I watched)
  • Content I read (same with articles/books)
  • Games I played (same with games)
  • What I noticed today (more personal observations about how I handled the day)

The notes I take throughout the day eg. projects completed, sites visited may or may not make it into the above. They will serve as memory joggers.

Still working my way through the best way to handle backlinking and I think I’ll end up with 2 approaches that look like this:

[[Stories from today]]

  • Started investigating [[Obsidian]] as an alternative to [[Roam Research]]
  • Caught up with [[Joe Bloggs]] for lunch at our usual restaurant

[[Content I watched]] - [[The Stand]], [[Interstellar]]

The difference between the two is that I want to keep the stories tied more to the day they occurred on, whereas the list of what I watched is just a list. I get backlinks on the [[Stories from today]] page which serves to tell me which days I wrote stories on. The layout for [[Content I watched]] gives me a backlinks “history” on the pages for the TV show/movie etc.

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12

I keep a separate vault for my journal (with Daily Notes) and my work notes (where I do not have Daily Notes). I work in academia and the 2 just really don’t mix well.
I use a template in my daily notes, which contains the daily schedule that I write the previous day, some structured reflection on what I accomplished in the day, and some free-style journal notes.
I also have a note where I transclude all the “journal notes” sections from my daily notes; it just reads as a journal, without the daily schedules and other stuff.
It’s been working quite well for me.

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