Time-series

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1

pr 2023 - Newbie here… What I’m trying to do I’m trying to get Obsidian to open a note based on the time of day, so for example, open a daily note at say, 8am or on first launch, and open a nightly note at 8…

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You need to get some cron job script written in your OS and use Obsidian URI to invoke the markdown files within Obsidian.
I’m not sure there any Reminder plugins that do this. There may be, though.

4

You do not necessarily need to start with cron jobs and stuff outside of Obsidian to get this working. It kind of depends on granular/specific you want you division to be.

Using daily notes Date format

Some of it can be achieved through tuning the Date format for you daily notes.

A few whimsical example of date format:

  • YYYY-MM-DD – This is a typically often used format which will give you a new daily note every new day
  • YYYY-MM-DD HH – This will give you a new “daily” note every hour (in 24h format)
  • YYYY-MM-DD mm – And this will give you a new “daily” note every unique minute of a given day. So if you hit the daily note button at 14:12 and 18:12 and so on, you’ll get the “12 minutes” daily note of that date.
  • YYYY-MM-DD A – This is so far the most useful variant, as this will add either AM or PM to the daily note to make it a unique file name. Which translates into having one daily note in the AM (00:00 - 11:59) and one daily note in the PM (12:00 - 23:59). Would this match your requirements?

Using something like Quick Add

Another option within Obsidian would be to utilise something the Quick Add plugin, and create a command/macro which opens a daily note according to your specificed time frame.

I’m not going to type it fully out here, but one could imagine setting up the macro to open a YYYY-MM-DD Work within the work hours, and YYYY-MM-DD Home depending on what the time of day is when you trigger the command. Using such an approach you could make as many or few daily note for each given day as you prefer.

Other plugins could most likely also be used, but I think Quick Add would be the easier option if you don’t want the simpler AM/PM version which you could get using the Date format of daily notes.

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5

If the example given in the main post is representative, another potential option — but more manual than was requested — would be to put a series of links with preset times in your daily note template, like:

- [[{{date}} 0800]]
- [[{{date}} 2000]]

(Colons are forbidden or problematic in most common filename systems.)