How to use Daily Notes with a Capture Note

Daily notes with Capture note

Also crossposted on my blog: https://jenglert.gitlab.io

Purpose

  • process incoming information (thoughts, ideas, recommendations)
  • write down tasks for the day and hold yourself accountable to them
  • keep track of content you consume and serve as springboard for notes taken on podcasts, articles, etc

Main

The 000 Capture [1] note is at the heart of my day to day note-taking in Obsidian.

It’s the universal list of all tasks and todos, collects reading / podcast / Netflix recommendations and serves as a shopping list.

In it I plan out my day and develop thoughts into notes.

I use it to keep track of all the things I’m doing through out the day (writing emails, planning things, writing or documenting code, talking to people etc.).

Markdown allows you to create checkbox lists with nested items so finished tasks can simply be crossed out.

For meetings, I create a note with discussion topics or minutes directly from the capture note.

I create a note for each article I read during the day with some basic metadata with author information, date of publishing and reading, link and tags. This allows organizing my collection of notes via tags and MOCs (maps of concepts).

Using one of the various Markdown editors for iOS, I can add thoughts, tasks, and recommendations to my capture note on mobile too[2]

At the end of the day, I copy all completed tasks, readings and meeting notes of the day into the corresponding daily note.

Over time, the daily notes thus become a repository that keeps track of tasks, projects and content consumed.

Unfinished tasks stay in the capture note. There, after doing my daily planning and prioritization on the next day I either pick them up or discard them.

On the top of my daily notes you can see a section with links to yesterday’s and tomorrow’s note. This allows me to quickly navigate between daily notes to revisit them or to move tasks from one day to the next.

The Markdown for this header template can just be copied from one daily note to another and adjusted for each day or you can use a script to paste it with a shortcut of your choice (here with Autohokey) [3]

<< Yesterday `[[link to yesterday's daily note]]` | `[[link to tomorrows's daily note]]` Tomorrow >>


`[[link to capture note]]`

---

your notes

[1]: the 000 in the file name ensures that the note is always on top in the file explorer pane

[2]: this requires using iCloud as directory for the Obsidian Vault

[3]: Autohotkey code

```ahk
; Syntax
; ^ = CTRL
; ! = ALT
; + = SHIFT
; # = WIN
; :: = run when pressed keys together

^+d::
	yesterday := a_now
	yesterday += -1, days

	tomorrow := a_now
	tomorrow += 1, days

	FormatTime, tomorrow, %tomorrow%, yyyy-MM-dd
	FormatTime, yesterday, %yesterday%, yyyy-MM-dd

	SendInput, << Yesterday **[[Daily notes/%yesterday% | %yesterday%]]**{space}|{space}**[[Daily notes/%tomorrow% | %tomorrow%]]** Tomorrow >> 
	Send, {Enter}
	Send, {Enter}
	SendInput, **[[000 Capture]]**
	Send, {Enter}
	Send, {Enter}---
	Send, {Enter}
Return

```
10 Likes

This is an impressive set up thank you for sharing it.
I’d love to know if you do 100% of task managment in obsidian / .md

Personally Notion databases work great for me, but of course owning your files in obsidian is a huge advantage.

Integrating tasks in obsidian makes the whole system so much more powerful.

I’ll give this a try and put my own spin on it, thanks for sharing it

1 Like

Thanks!

Task management 100% in Obsidian, yes!

Never used Notion myself but I built a whole task manager / roadmap planner in Coda (https://coda.io) which works more or less the same afaict.

The main things I’m currently missing in Obsidian are collaborative notes (–> coming with Obsidian Publish), and creating certain types of notes with a frontmatter / yaml template (i.e. tasks with attributes: date created, time estimated, date finished, actual completion time etc) that can then be visualized for example in a timeline or with some monthly stats.

All of this could still be done using only markdown files without any databases and hence you preserve the snappiness that makes Obsidian so great. Coda always felt like a chore to use; too slow, too much mouse usage. Obsidian supports my thinking in real-time so to say with just a couple of shortcuts learned!

I’m not yet using Obsidian for my life-tracking. This is where databases shine imo: very structured data like habit tracking and timeboxing. Potentially you could do that in Obsidian (daily note template with timeboxes and checkboxes for all of your habits, but it’s way easier in a dedicated spreadsheet).

I’m still contemplating about how to put all of this together in on tool…

The thing I like about the spreadsheet is that it gives a visual overview over agenda, tasks done and planned, habit progress and all sorts of other metrics that can be calculated from the data.

Obsidian really shines when interlinking the notes and ideas that are behind every cell in the spreadsheet (i.e. meeting with XYZ -> Obsidian note with discussion topics that links to other meetings, other thoughts and concepts etc).


Moreover, I want to integrate that with an actual calendar (Google, Outlook, iCloud whatever) that can send/receive (email)invites and send notifications .

Ultimately, I’m looking to build/use something like described here, a Human Programming Interface, that pulls together all of those data streams!

3 Likes

this is super interesting, thank you so much for sharing, I’ll be revisiting this as I give it a try myself.

Thank you!

1 Like

I like the idea of a Capture Note. Thanks. Is there a way to have future events pop up automatically on a Daily Note? For example, a movie that’s coming out 2020-01-22. Or are we tied to yesterday, today, and tomorrow only?

Not sure if that’s what you’re looking for, but you can create a calendar note that links to all the daily notes (past and future). This way you can directly jump to a future date and add a reminder / event etc. Once the day comes and you open the daily note, it’ll be already in there.

Here is the forum post about the script to generate a calendar note:

4 Likes

Thanks for this! Sounds super interesting!

I myself am in the process of setting up my own Obsidian system and your process is interesting. I personally keep my tasks and project work in Notion so that Obsidian will remain a place for thinking and knowledge.

Hey, happy to hear!

Yeah I’m still a bit on the fence between

using Obsidian for everything (information capture (=web, book, podcast highlights, meeting notes, emails(?)) and task & time management and knowledge creation) (which ultimately would mean web history, calendar events, habit tracker, email storage in Obsidian like people do with org-mode)

or

using it as markdown note storage on top of which I run task management and everything relying on structured data (=habit tracking, calendar etc) in e.g. Notion or Coda (see link below for an example on displaying Obsidian notes in a calendar view using Coda and Google Calendar)

1 Like