How do you organize daily notes?

Knowledge management
#1

Pretty basic question - how do you keep daily notes organized? Specifically I mean - over time its a pretty long and flat folder structure. I would have thought there would be some auto-mechanism to sort into year/month folders. (Is there?). Else - if I were do this manually would it “break” anything?

Thanks.!

What I’m trying to do

#2

You won’t break anything by doing it manually. I organize by name with “yyyy-mm-dd, DayOfWeek,” in a folder. I keep the current year’s notes at the top level of the folder with prior years split into their own folders.

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#3

I link them to the year (I have notes for every year from 1450 to 2030, as I study history).

And all of them link to yesterday and tomorrow, and have the same tag. That’s it.

Once a week I look through them and put stuff in them that needs to be processed somewhere else.

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#4

Actually, you can specify date format using a slash("/") separated path. Thus would makes the daily file into suitable directory. i.e. I use YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD as my date format, so that it creates file named 2021-05-06 in directory 2021/05/.

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#5

I use the calendar plugin with a template with a hierarchical tag, for example:

---
date created: 📅  {{date:YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM}}
tags:
  - '#journal/{{date:YYYY}}/{{date:MM}}'
---

The tags with slashes like ‘#journal/2021/05’ allow browsing the journal in a hierarchy.

I also review my journal notes each week to gather interesting things that I want to develop further, giving them a new note. From time to time, I also purge journal notes that more than x-month-old, to another vault I use as an archive (to fight excess of notes)

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#6

Did not know this. Thanks for pointing it out.
…and to think, I was changing my daily notes path once a year like a caveman! Never again!

For what it’s worth, here’s my setup. I don’t feel it necessary to split too deep since I name the files so explicitly:
image

Inside each YYYY folder is a flat structure of folders titled YYYY-MM-DD and YYYY-MM-DD-Meeting name

1 Like
#7

@ryzn Thanks for the tip. It will be very useful.

#8

Just discovered this breaks the hotkeys for “Open Next/Previous/Today’s Daily Note” :frowning:
Too bad, it was nice while it lasted!

3 Likes
#9

I couldn’t get it to work. **<% tp.date.now("dddd | MMMM Do, YYYY") %>**

#10

Obsidian should make this the default setting for Daily Notes or put the example in the settings dialog.