I am curious if anyone else uses tags to keep metadata about their days? I have been using these in my daily notes to track what I did on the previous day:
I do when applicable. I created a template for daily notes (as well as others) that I will post in the forum for others to use that you might like. I’m making some tweaks but hope to post this weekend.
Since I was posting a lot of what I read and watched in my daily notes, at first my thought was to add generic tags like #read and #watched. After giving it some thought though, I realised that they aren’t very actionable in the future. Like I don’t see myself ever wanting to see a list of everything I’ve read or watched. Otherwise the browser history or YouTube history would be a page I’d hangout more at but I hardly ever visit them. So I instead decided to go with specific topics/subjects instead like Chess, Swimming, Mental health, etc. This made much more sense as I can see myself wanting to look at all chess videos or articles I learned last year, so it becomes more actionable.
Then, the other issue is I avoid using tags for these purposes even though semantically I think it makes perfect sense to use #chess, #swimming, etc. everywhere. However, in Obsidian, tags don’t have their own pages and only show up in search and links work better than tags. So in my daily notes now, I just use links like,
Played [[Chess]] with [[Person]]
[[Chess Lesson]] - Rooks on open files love smiles (Youtube link)
This allows me to go to any of those three links here and see all backlinks which I can’t do with tags. So I use links like tags is a summary of my workflow so far.
That is really interesting Rishi! We should sit down and have a chat once.
One very useful tag that I use is #thoughts - as in when I am taking book notes- and summaries sometimes I will have questions that pop in my mind.
Ive figured that having these #thoughts tag together is very useful -Helps me develop original ideas
Thanks! I usually hangout at the Obsidian and PKM Discord groups for a while every evening. I’m from India so there is a time difference but you can message me here as well.
These are some great points @Rishi! I didn’t think of it in quite that way, so I think tags are better for search than recall. I think a more interactive tag pane could be helpful in Obsid…
Yeah. I’m sure we’d figure out better ways to use tags when we have advanced search tagging capabilities. Someone I remembered distinguished between links and tags as, links are actual connections between notes whereas tags are spontaneous categories which group unrelated notes with something in common.