I’ve posted this on Reddit:
Hello Obsidian community!
I’ve been using Obsidian for daily journaling and note-taking, and I had an idea that I think could be really helpful, especially for those of us with ADHD. I’m wondering if there’s already a way to do this or if it might make an interesting plugin project:
What if we could have Obsidian randomly select and email us one of our notes or journal entries on a daily or weekly basis?
Here’s what I’m envisioning:
- The ability to choose which folders or tags to include (e.g., only journal entries, or all notes).
- Set a frequency (daily, weekly, etc.).
- Have it delivered straight to our inbox.
Why this could be awesome:
- Rediscover forgotten ideas and insights
- Reinforce learning by revisiting past notes
- Prompt reflection on past journal entries
- Provide unexpected inspiration or reminders
- Help with memory recall, especially beneficial for ADHD folks
For those of us who struggle with object permanence or tend to forget what we’ve written, this could be a game-changer. It’s like a little gift from your past self, delivered right when you might need it most.
Is there already a way to achieve this within Obsidian? If not, does this sound like a useful plugin idea? I’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, or if anyone knows of similar functionality in other tools.
Thanks for reading, and I’m looking forward to your responses!
Some of the responses:
- From https://www.reddit.com/user/Schollert/
For your idea to work, the program will have to have access to your Obsidian Vault at all times. That may be a challenge if you have on, say, a laptop that is not always powered on.
In addition to that, it would have to have its own mail client (SMTP) or access to something that can send the note/the text to you.
Last, but not least, you would need a scheduling mechanism that can trigger it all at defined intervals.
It is absolutely possible, but there are more things that need to be solved to make it work for everybody.
Bear in mind, that we have not yet taken filtering on tags into account or taken repeted sending of the same note into account.
But it is a fun idea and I do see your point.
My reply:
Thank you for your insights, a very interesting point of view, I’m not a dev and I don’t know much about it but I think it would be great if it can work somehow more convenient.
As for accessing the vault at all times is a problem, there is this plugin “Share Note” that generate a encrypted web page of your note, I think it might help with this issue it’s like this: Random Note
I also think about something like making the vault in the cloud (like google drive) or use a python script to upload the .md files into the cloud and then use service like IFTTT to automate sending random mails with the content of the notes. maybe even send them to your telegram or other messaging services.
With help of other automation services like Mail Slurp, Zapier, There is also this sciprt on github Random Email Content Generator but it rely on local SMTP as you said,
Plus there was this website who provide a service, they send you an email weekly to write notes on it, and it keeps showing them to you randomly.
After I used Random Notes and “Smart Random Notes” plugin, these idea just popped into my head,
There is an obsidian forum member that talked about it years ago - Link
So, what do you think? Is it possible in convient way?