Does anyone use Obsidian as a Logbook to track the times of daily life stuff (wake up, eat, sleep, read a book, meditation, medication etc.)? I have a Lumberjack shortcut on my mobile that opens Obsidian on my daily note and adds a timestamp, so that everything I have to do is writing the thing I want to track. For example,
But I’m not completely happy with this workflow, because it makes discoverability difficult. Let’s say I want to have an overview of all the days (and maybe times) where I meditated. If I searched for meditation, it’d give me also non-journal istances like Meditation is useful because bla bla which is not what I’m looking for. Making meditation a note doesn’t solve the problem, rather it shifts it from the search results to the backlinks.
The closest solution I’ve found so far is to use tags for logging and links for the rest, so that when I click on a tag I’ll ONLY get the logging strings. But having a daily note full of tags is kinda ugly and not the best for readability.
What I have in mind is something that is able to pick up the format shown above and makes a list of days where an event happened and maybe some time charts or heatmap and whatnot. The Tracker plugin doesn’t cut it as it works with the YAML frontmatter.
You can use a regular expression to narrow your search. For example, /- [0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2}/ meditation will match the list marker and time in your journal, followed by “meditation”.
You can narrow your search other ways, too. If your journal is in its own folder, you can exclude other results by adding something like path:"22 Log" to your search (if your journal folder is 22 Log). If it’s in the vault root but the journal files use a special naming convention, you can add something like file:Journal- (if their names start with Journal- or file:2022- (if they’re date-based and you just want this year).
If you don’t want to type all those extra things when you search, you can embed the search in a note so you only have to change the search term each time.
All of the above is in the Search page in the manual.
You can use CSS to make tags more readable — change the color, remove the underline…I think there’s even a way to hide the hash mark. If you only want to change the way they look in your journal, the Auto Class plugin lets you add a class (and thus styles) based on the file path.
For the problem of making “meditation” a note not solving the problem of non-journal results, you could try using a different form of the word like “meditating”.
This tag pills snippet doesn’t (necessarily) do what you want, but it should show you the classes you need to target and many of the things you can change (like color and background-color). You can use text-decoration: none; to remove the underline (that’s in the snippet but it’s not obvious you haven’t memorized that “feature” of CSS).
I don’t know offhand how to hide the hash mark, but you could inspect the CSS of the Sanctum theme, which hides them in Edit mode. I think it’s actually a bug, but it might show you how to do it or give you a lead. I would recommend only doing it in Reading mode — it can make it awkward to edit tags.
