I am struggling to find a workflow that makes logging my thoughts in daily notes easy to group and organize. Working with topics I am interested in and that are well formed is pretty straight forward and I enjoy it in Obsidian. Example, a history topic. I can link the dates, things that happen and are related, etc. All that feels natural and is interesting and fun. The challenge I have is thoughts that I don’t have categories for yet or nothing I would be able to quickly recall. These could be just stream of thought and something I jot down in my daily notes. I have used Logseq in tandem for a while and for that use case it just works. I don’t really have to think about it as I can just put things in blocks and indent to make child blocks and then tag them. I can’t seem to accomplish this in Obsidian in anything that make sense to me. I am wondering if I am just missing something obvious here.
Any suggestions? Do you just start writing your thoughts down and link right there in the daily note as you go? What about when you have 4 or five linked references to an idea spread across several daily notes, do you copy and paste that into the note from there to begin to create a topic? I think that is where I feel the most friction.
I honestly would just use Logseq for this but there are strong aspects of Obsidian that keep me engaged with it.
You could check out my post on Planning a new vault structure using a table. I’ve been using Obsidian for almost two years now and have been through multiple vault iterations. My new approach seems to be working so far and may give you some inspiration for a bottom-up approach.
Thanks, that is cool! Do you typically log things in something like daily notes and put a tag at the end of the block/paragraph, etc or do you create new notes for things more often and tag the notes?
Ok, so the note composer ‘extract note’ feature is what I have been looking for. That and the setting to embed the note in place of the extracted text solves my use case and makes sense.
Thanks, that is cool! Do you typically log things in something like daily notes and put a tag at the end of the block/paragraph, etc or do you create new notes for things more often and tag the notes?
I tried daily notes but they didn’t really work for me. Basically the kinds of notes you see in the screenshot in the other post I linked are the only kinds of notes I take, and each one is it’s own. So each dream gets added as it’s own note, each quote, etc.
Ok, so the note composer ‘extract note’ feature is what I have been looking for. That and the setting to embed the note in place of the extracted text solves my use case and makes sense.
It’s a helpful feature, yes. Glad you found a solution
I have a “Junkyard” note where I deposit all the things that sporadically come to mind and is not clear where they should go. I sit once a week, go through the file, and send everything to the place where it should go. It works for me because I know everything will find its place and it takes me only about 30 min to organize everything, make connections, etc. Plus, it’s nice to come back to your thinking every week, recall and cement information.
I stole the idea of a “Zero” page note, think it was from Joe Buhlig. It’s my index to categories - e.g. “Quotes” becomes a quotes note with a list of them. An individual quote will have a link to the person and “People” is on my Zero page. If there’s a topic, then I’ll link to a “Topics” page. You get the idea.
