My Monthly Overview setup (digital Bullet Journal)

[superstarfighter]

First off: I am fairly new to the obsidian family, I only stumbled upon it a few days ago but I must say I love this rabbit hole a lot! Reading entries in this forum makes me see all the sheer endless possibilities. Seeing MOCs is awe-inspiring and frightening at the same time. I’m looking forward to using this program daily and seeing my notes graph grow. Until now, I mostly planned my days offline on paper in my bullet journal (bujo) and I do love my monthly trackers. Which brings me to the topic of this post.

Recently, there were (at least) two posts on here that presented suggestions or solutions for bringing bujo elements into the digital format.

• Plugin Request for BuJo-type tasks/migration/scheduling (this also gives an elaborate explanation what a bullet journal is)
• Habit Tracker Plugin (This plugin creates a little calendar with manually set marks for habits, if I understood correctly)

With the power house that is dataview, I created a little query that spits out a nice table with check marks whenever I did a habit.

To achieve this, I made a template for my daily note. It contains the following in the YAML

habits:
  run:
  walk:
  noCoffee:
  thesis:
  

and so on.

Apart from habits, I also track my mood in 5 steps and many other things. The full YAML looks like this:

habittracker: ✔️☀️🌙🟠🟣
habits: 
  NO:
  MEH:
  OK: ☀️
  GOOD:
  ALLZEN: 
  
  period: 
  vitamins: ✔️
  no_coffee: ✔️
  
  biking: 
  running: ✔️
  walking: ✔️
  yoga:
  gym:
  
  writing:
  diary:
  reading: ✔️
  
  thesis: 
  coding:
tags:
  - dailies
  - dailyplanner
date: 2021-10-10

Ok, so I am filling these out in each “daily” and tag them with one unifying tag, in this case it’s “dailyplanner”. I add a check mark emoji behind a habit or activity I fulfilled that day. I also set a sun for morning mood and a moon for evening mood. In my table I translate “NO” to “ALLZEN” over into numbers 1 through 5. This creates a more plot/graph like appearance.

In a “Monthly” Note, I then create the following:

table without id
date.day as "#",
habits.NO as "1",
habits.MEH as "2",
habits.OK as "3",
habits.GOOD as "4",
habits.ALLZEN as "5",
habits.period as "",
habits.vitamins as "vits",
habits.no_coffee as "no coffee",
habits.thesis as thesis
from #dailyplanner and -#template
where date.month = 10
sort date

To not exhaust the page width, I created two separate tables, one for mood tracking, period/cycle, vitamins, coffee and thesis work and a second one for activities like reading, running, yoga.

So, in summary:

1. have a template for daily notes with habits to track in the YAML
2. have a unifying tag to gather all dailies
3. have a monthly overview to create a table with dataview.

I hope this helps or inspires my fellow bullet journalists out there!

[4lch4]

This is awesome! Thank you so much for sharing this

[melhopkop]

@superstarfighter, this is so helpful, thank you!

[anavoll]

This is exactly what I’m looking to do (just with a few fewer habits) and I’m struggling to get the table to work. I’m sure it’s user error, but I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. Any ideas?

[I-d-as]

@anavoll Usually Dataview would return an error if you were doing something wrong. Assuming you have Dataview installed and enabled properly, I wonder whether you may have forgotten to add the word dataview immediately after the opening backticks of your block. It should look something like this:

```dataview
(Code here)

```

This is just a guess, but it is worth double checking. Good luck.

[anavoll]

Thanks to a bunch of trial and error help from the Discord crew, I got it up and running. It was a combination of errors.

[philipbroadway]

Hi - I’m new to bullet journalling and also kinda new to using Obsidian in a more advanced way tbh, but figured I’d share how I’m using properties to track activities

Basically, with the new yaml property support it’s pretty easy to add a group of activities you want to track at the top of any template by pasting raw yaml or clicking the add property button.

For me the benefit of doing this is programmatically being able to calculate totals across multiple entries by simply loading the yaml as opposed to parsing marking

Example:

---

# Use YAML front matter to specify activities w/ emoji

🧎🏻: 20 mins

📖: 20 mins
🏃🏼: 9

🏋🏻: 20 mins

🧑🏼‍🍳: 20 mins

🕺🏼: 0 mins

🦮: 30 mins

---