I agree with others about the usefulness of having the date in the title. When I search in Obsidian, the results are alphabetical. If the note titles are plain English (or some other natural language) I don’t know how that sort order is useful. With the date prefix, my search results are in chronological order, which can be very helpful when I actually need to see notes as a sequence of events, like log entries. For example, if you have a long-term illness, your notes will be in chronological order which charts the progression of the illness. While Obsidian is obviously designed to not require such a rigid construct as a log, there are simply times when your notes are best served as a sequence of events.
I get very annoyed when I’m reading an online article, and it has no date. It might be about the behavior of some software. My first thought is, “Are these statements even valid anymore?” While I could put the date in the note, I prefer it at the front of the title because there are times when this tells me what I need to know. For example, I could have a note titled,
Partitioning a drive with Disk Utility
Sounds useful. Now compare it to this title:
201412081650-Partitioning a drive with Disk Utility
Without even looking at the note body, I know this info is 6 years old and may be stale. (In fact it would be.)
There are other times when you may make notes that beg for a date:
- Summer Vacation 2020
- Tax return 2019
Compare this to:
- 202004251205-Summer Vacation
- 202002151335-Tax Return
You may not need the date down to the minute in these examples, but the benefit in the latter case is that all dates are in a common format.
Thus by using the Zettelkasten-type date:
- When it’s helpful to have a date in the title, it’s already there
- When it’s helpful to see a list of notes as a chronology, they already are
- All dates are in common format