@icebear, thanks for sharing your method. This is very helpful. I have two use cases where a chronology is important.
The first use case is a timeline to track something like an event, progression of a child’s illness, etc. Your method works well.
The second case has to do with a tool I’ve used for over a decade called OmniOutliner. As the name implies, it’s an outliner, and has a lot of additional features. I have a top-level entry for every personal task / project / event. Each of these entries has their own log, so each task / project / event has it’s own chronology, as well as other subsections for to-do’s and things like that. I can certainly see how I could use MOCs to represent this hierarchy, and even have a separate folder in the vault for each task / project / event. Or specify the hierarchy on the tag, such as
- #NewCar-Log
- #NewCar-Tasks
although I see this use of tags to be sustainable only if these task / project / event notes are their own vault, lest I run into name collisions when I want to re-use a name. Right now I’m not sure of the pitfalls of one method over another.
OmniOutliner has some other valuable features that work with the chronology and I’m not sure how I could implement them in Obsidian.
The first is numerical or time roll-ups. Sometimes I like to keep track of time on a project; for example, so I don’t spend too much time on a hobby. In OmniOutliner I could define a numerical or time field, and those values roll up the hierarchy. So for example, if I have three log entries for the photography topic, 1-hour each, at the top of the log it reports three hours. and those three hours roll up to the top of the activity. I could certainly specify this as a key, but I’ll have to work up an external way to count those values.
The second feature I use heavily, and I’m really hoping I can do this in Obsidian somehow, is a weekly or biweekly review. Since all the entries are time-stamped in OmniOutliner, I can use a filter rule such as “show me all the entries for the past week” and I will get a custom view of the hierarchy with only those entries. Each entry connects up through the hierarchy to the top, so I can see the context of each entry as a complete hierarchy, and I can review my activity for that selected period of time. I’m hoping I can do something similar in Obsidian, to be able to see all the entries for a period of time for personal review. I suppose I could have a “top-level” MOC that links to all entries and thus provides a master chronology, but it seems like the bookkeeping would be heavy. Any ideas here would be appreciated. Thanks again.
Edit: I should make it clear what I mean by the bookkeeping being heavy. If I have a “top-level” MOC linking to all entries across all tasks / events / projects so that I have a master chronology for which I can walk backwards, this means I’m updating at least two MOCs to make an entry: This master chronology MOC, and a MOC for the task / event / project. Maybe this isn’t as much overhead work as I think it is. Am I approaching this incorrectly?