đź“Š POLL: Do you make daily notes?

Do you make daily notes?

  • Yes
  • On and off
  • I did but stopped
  • No

0 voters

In addition, in case you make daily notes, whats the benefits for you?

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Yes. Benefits: Keeping track of what I’ve done every day, journaling, adding reminders that don’t belong in my task manager.

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I’ve made daily notes for years, and switched over to Obsidian for these as soon as the first beta was public. I’ve evolved a “template” for these with Typinator – as soon as Obsidian creates the blank daily note in the morning, I invoke the Typinator expansion which runs several scripts in the background and grabs key information from various websites, Calendar, and OmniFocus – this populates a outline of the planned day, which I then add to during the day with journal observations, links to topics I’m working on within Obsidian, and tasks that are specific to work I’m doing in Obsidian.

Yes, but… I heavily use transclusions.

I use QuickAdd and Templater to insert a transclusion to the daily note, make a new header in the target recurring meeting note (or 1-1 note, etc), and then open that target file and new header.

That way I have an entry in the daily note to scroll through at the end of the day, and in the recurring meeting note to quickly see previous topics at the meeting.

I use mine as a journal, personal log, project log, and scratchpad. (EDIT: Actually, project log and some other stuff goes into weekly notes, but same idea.)

I use it as an inbox, it’s almost like a digital post-it note. I can just write things down and don’t have to think about if and how it will fit into the rest of my vault. I also use a iOS shortcut to dictate text and append it to the daily note.
I can process daily notes any time and at the end of the month merge any left over notes into a monthly note.

Btw, how do you create a poll here?

Every Day! Beats notebooks on a shelf……(oops!)

I did it for a bit and stopped. I found it to be distracting, sometimes even an outlet for procrastination trying to define what come in and out of each DN. But the last nudge was the labor that went into stitching pieces of writing done at different times, days, moods, mindsets and DNs. I still write daily but directly on Longform files or outlines. I know the pieces at play, no need for a DN to remind/incentivize me to find them.

Yes, and I make sure almost all of my notes I made for the day have a link to {{YYYYMMDD}} so that when I create anything on that day, it gets linked to the note, showing me what I have done in terms of note-making. Part of my daily reflection is reflecting on my notes so it helps to see the notes made on the day right in front of me through their linkage.

I am doing this format at the moment, no scientific reason at all:

  • [[Create]] :ballot_box_with_check: What did you create or do today?
  • [[Connect]] :handshake:Who did you get in touch with today?
  • [[Consume]] :inbox_tray:What content did you consume today?
  • [[Ponder]] :bulb:What ideas did you think of or come across? Any atomic ideas?
  • [[Coordinate]] :date: What calendar items did you attend? (meetings etc.)
  • [[Consolidate]] What habits have you continued on doing? What affirmations do you have?
2 Likes

The primary benefit for me: it stops things falling through the cracks. I add everything I MUST remember to my Daily Note template–it’s my ongoing reminders list.

When an item is no longer useful (the event has passed; I made the phone calls etc.) I delete that item from the template.

I create a new Daily Note as soon as I open Obsidian for the day, so I can’t avoid seeing my reminders.

This has worked for me for many months, when long To Do lists don’t work. My theory is that it prevents me feeling overwhelmed… :slight_smile:

Everytime i mention a date in another note, i make it a link to the corresponding daily note instead (wheter it exists or not), that way i can easily find events that happened on that day, sometimes because they are written in the note, or because they are backlinks of the daily note.

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I use my daily note as a scratchpad for the day. I use it to write down notes for my daily meeting with my team where we report what we accomplished the previous day, and what we plan to accomplish today. Sometimes I use it to jot down notes during a conversation or note something I want to remember later that day.

The daily note is valuable in three ways:

  • It’s a place to prepare for my daily report.
  • It’s a home for daily one-liners that don’t need their own notes.
  • It’s a record of my daily activities. I sometimes review them for end-of-month reports or when I need to find out the exact date something happened.
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To be honest my daily notes are more like a daily log hehehe … i just put every event on it and i have a section for ideas, articles or subjects that i want to visit later on.

It’s designed in a way that by the end of the weak i need to make a summery of the information, this way i can add all relevant information that i want to visit later on in a task list, or scheduled time to check on that subject.

There are two part of my daily notes (DN).

One is the personal journal itself, it doesn’t have too rigid of a structure, just what i plan to do today and then an inbox of what i do/read that i want to keep (i dont log everything, only those i feel need to capture for future references, hence tagging it accordingly). During my weekly review, I’ll skim thru again for those worthy of putting in its tagged notes (e.g. i might capture idea i get from a page in a book, so i capture that first in DN, then during weekly, if it’s worthy, get puts into the book summary).

Two is my work meeting notes. In a day, i might have few meetings in different projects, i capture all those meeting notes in DN. Its just there mostly for future reference. But sometimes the info is significant, it gets captured again in project notes.