I’m calling it Future Dating a Backlink

Hello Tribe!

I’m sure someone else has asked this before, I’m just not sure what to call it specifically, so searching for something you don’t know the name of is a bit of a challenge.

So, here it goes.

About the only thing that I really miss from Roam is the ability to create a note, or an input and future date it.

Let’s say I’m wanting to have a specific event show up on a date 4 months from now. In Roam, I was able to create a link for the date in line to whatever I was writing, and when I came to the daily log for that date in the future; the note I created would show up!

Is there some way to do that with Obsidian?

What I’m trying to do

You can link to a future daily note and you’ll see it in a back link.

I also sometimes create future daily notes and add or link the info I want.

The Review plugin also provides functionality close to what you’re hoping for.

Are you referring to the absence of a date picker?

I do something like this with dataview plugin. I have tasks (events in your case) on my daily note. If I want to have an event popup over 4 months I just go to the daily note for that specific date (calendar plugin makes that easy) and add the event.

On my daily notes I have a dataview query that shows all tasks (you can make a inline field for events for example) for the coming 7 days so I am timely attented to the existence of that task/event.

The query is like so:

list birthday from #person 
where birthday.month = this.file.day.month
and (birthday.day >= this.file.day.day and birthday.day <= this.file.day.day + 7)
sort birthday.day 

This example can be made easier as for birthday’s I most of the time do not know the birthyear exactly.

An alternative would be to add a link to the daily note over 4 months on your event page so you see it in the linked list by that time but I guess that list can be rather long when you have a big event … hopes this helpes.

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All Great tips — thanks. I’ve added the calendar plugin, and that seems to work as close as I can get for now. I suppose I wonder if a better option would be to not have a designated folder for the daily note. This way you can just type something like [[May 13, 2021]], and that would open the link.

The problem with doing that currently, is that my “New File Location” is set to a designated folder (005 - Digi Bujo). So, when I type [[May 13, 2021]] — that doesn’t actually reflect the proper folder of the given daily note.

So I suppose my question to the group is; is there a way to add a future date, and direct it to the proper file/folder ?

Like I said, the calendar plugin helps, but for sure not without friction of needing to be prompted to add a new note from a popup window every time

I handle dates using the absolutely fantastic “natural language dates” package. Just type your date in natural language and use the package to convert it into a link (I use the “parse natural language date” command which works best if the date is typed out without spaces). I wouldn’t bother manually adding the event to the relevant day. My daily notes template uses a search query to find out when the current date has been previously referred to, though of course, opening a backlinks pane is another option. There is also an option to always show the backlinks in the document, using the “backlinks in document” package, but these lack certain features in the backlinks pane.

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The Periodic Notes plugin does what you’re looking for.

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