Daily Notes are the backbone of my workflow. I use them as stream-of-consciousness notebook pages. No template. On any given day, the Daily Note could be a personal diary, a project planning doc, or just a blank space to think through new ideas. (Daily Notes are my Morning Pages, for those familiar with that practice.)
At the same time, I am building a Zettelkasten of networked ideas, composed of permanent notes. Naturally, many of my permanent notes were born as free-written passages in a Daily Note.
I had the same question as OP @marcmaurer - which I would rephrase as: How much do you separate or inter-link Daily Notes and permanent notes?
Like @alexkillby I couldn’t imagine not linking Daily Notes to permanent notes. That’s how I’m linking my thinking.
Here’s my current workflow:
- Free write new content in a Daily Note, linking to
[[existing ideas]]
and potential [[new ideas]]
as I go.
- Review what I’ve written.
- If I’ve generated text that could be a meaningful addition to the note for
[[existing idea]]
, I click-open that note in a new pane and copy/paste the new text to it for later integration. Close pane and continue.
- If I’ve generated text that would be a good start for a note about
[[new idea]]
, I click-create-open that note in a new pane and copy/paste the text to it as a stub. Close pane and continue.
(I sometimes add a link from the permanent note back to the Daily Note which contributed the new text, if I want to track the timing or provide context.)
This process has two downsides.
First, there’s a lot of redundant text in Obsidian since the same passage may appear in both a Daily Note and permanent note. I’m fine with that. I see Daily Notes as preserving a snapshot of my thinking on a particular day — whereas permanent notes represent the present-day synthesis of my thinking as it has evolved over time.
Second, as @macedotavares said, densely linked Daily Notes clutter up the graph view of the permanent note knowledge graph. Thankfully, the new graph filtering feature provides a solution:
If you keep your Daily Notes in a subfolder as I do, you can filter them out of the graph by pathname: -path:"Daily"
If you tag all your Daily Notes instead, you can filter them out: -#daily