Organizing daily notes by week/month/year

Help
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What I’m trying to do

I would like to have my journal entries organized by week, month, and year instead one long ordered list.

Things I have tried

The entry on “daily notes” in help has nothing relevant to my interest. There is a lot in the forum but most of it strikes me as “over-technologizing” journaling. I quit reading after a while. And I saw nothing related to my interest.

That said, something I encountered lead me to wonder if the Calendar plug-in might provide a solution. I’ll be checking it out.

Also, since daily notes are files, and “journal” is just a folder, is it possible to just manually insert week/month/year folders under the journal head and move daily notes into them?

I searched under “journal” and “daily notes”

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You can use the “Date format” field in the Daily Notes settings to do that. For example, mine looks like this:

YYYY/MM_MMM/YYMMDD

Which today created a file called “230829.md” in the /2023/08_Aug/ folder of my vault.

2 Likes
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Thanks. Further reading had suggested that. At first I didn’t see how to do it. I found that entering a version of your format into the date format specification field did the trick.

One problem: it appears it only applies to daily notes created after the new format was established.

Is there a way to retroactively get old daily notes structured the new way? (Here I should say I am not any kind of coder. :slightly_frowning_face:)

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I’m afraid that’ll most likely be a manual clicking-and-dragging task. It may take a while if you have a lot of notes and you want them in weekly folders, but at least you only have to do it once. I think you’ll have to choose between organizing them by week or by month, since week numbers don’t line up conveniently with month numbers.

If you do it all within Obsidian’s left-sidebar file list, all the affected links throughout your vault should update automatically, so at least there’s that.

2 Likes
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Just be aware that when using a folder in the date format, the commands “next” and “previous” no longer work. (At least the last time I tested it a long time ago.)

I tried to open a bug. But it was suggested to be a feature request. I don’t use that format anymore, so I don’t worry about it. Daily Notes, next and previous fail when using folder in template

No, there isn’t. You would have to manage this yourself somehow, or find an existing tool.

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I’m not familiar with those commands, and nothing’s coming up in the command palette other than “next tab” and “previous tab,” which is something different.

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Sorry I should have been more specific:

Daily notes: Open next daily note and Daily notes: Open previous daily note

And you won’t see those commands available if you use slashes in your date format. That’s the problem I was referring to. Those commands only show up when you are on a valid-named daily note. (I’m not sure if “Periodic Notes” plugin handles that. I should test it out.)

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Whaaaat — well, I use Periodic Notes anyway. (I suspect commands work but I only use links and rarely Quick Switcher or Calendar to navigate them.)

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Thanks. I’ve started clicking and dragging. Fortunately I don’t have that many entries.

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