How do you organize daily notes?

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

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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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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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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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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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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

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

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

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

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

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Do you have two instances of the calendar or are you using the same calendar for your personal notes as you are with your historical calendar?

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Ah, is this tracked as a bug somewhere (e.g. Github) ?

@bfc3 - The daily notes feature is a core plug-in, so it would have to be submitted as a feature request on this forum to get it tracked.

However, shortly after this conversation, I adopted the Periodic Notes plugin as a companion to the Calendar plugin. I use the commands for next/current/previous note directly from there, instead of the core plugin’s commands.

image

Using an identical setup as before, everything works as expected - including these hotkeys. You DO need to turn off the core daily notes plugin for things to work with Periodic notes. Make sure you read the documentation if you go this route. Not complicated, but there are some advanced settings you can get bogged down in if you choose to.

For reference, here are my daily notes settings in the Periodic notes plugin that achieve what I was doing before. I haven’t changed this setup in a very long time, and the switch from 2021 to 2022 was seamless. I expect the same in a couple of weeks.

Hope that helps.

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Nice! Oh, one question, where in Obsidian do you specify that note path?