Working with daily notes and project logs

During my workdays, I log what I’m working on and takes meeting notes in the daily note. The result is currently something like this

- 10:30 Meeting with [[Person A]] regarding [[Project X]] ^325q35
  - meeting note 1.1
  - meeting note 2.1
- 11:20 Wrote on [[Weekly report Project Y|report]] for [[Project Y]] 
- 11:45 Meeting with [[Person B]] regarding [[Project Y]]
  - meeting note 2.1
  - meeting note 2.2

In the project specific pages, I gather the most important steps in a log with links back to the daily notes. For [[Project X]], it could look like this, using block references

## Worklog
*Week 13*
- [[2021-04-01#^325q35]] – Meeting with [[Person A]]
    - Decided to do 1.1

This is a lot of manual work at the end of each day. Is there a way to add tags at the end of the important bullets in my daily page and have them pulled into the projects pages automatically? If I append/prepend meeting note 1.1 with a tag like impPrjX for “important project X”, is there a way to create a query (using DataView plugin or otherwise) to get that line into the project page?

Any other ideas/workarounds from those of you who do this kind of logging?

Maybe something like this?

Instead of blocks, you could use headings for the different projects. Personally, I add a link to my daily note and open it from there. I take my meeting notes on those individual files (makes it easy to share too).

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Really interested in this myself. Tried adding work log to my daily notes but asked myself the question: why all these project details in my daily notes? Date is less relevant than content. So I started logging the notes in my project files. When taking the note I add new heading with the date in the same format as my daily note title, yyyymmdd. That way, notes appear in the unlinked backlink section, which might be useful.

But this way my local graph doesn’t get cluttered with all my daily note files, which typically do not add value in providing me new ideas at a glance.

Still playing around with the setup and still interested in optimizing this.

The notes refactor plugin is very cool btw for when you logged something ‘here’, but decide it should actually in a different or separate note

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Great idea. I like Daily Notes as a “have done” list (complementing my “to-do” list), and I also like project dashboards to track progress on individual projects. This tip potentially combines the two without having to duplicate information or make arbitrary choices about what goes where.

Indeed. I hate duplication of data.
I’m also concerned about having too many links or tags, which will make them useless. Date links (or tags) are not relevant to me because the do not contain information. However, they are ideal in the unlinked mentions section. I assigned a hotkey to insert the date.

My way of working:

A GTD note
I have a Personal GTD note and a GTD file for my client.
It is a kanban like note: all tasks listed. Highest prio in the top of the list, so that I know what to pick up first. These tasks may stand alone, or be a link to a project note

Project notes
When I’m working on a specific project (I have multiple running at the same time) I capture my notes in the project note. The related open tasks for this project stay in the top of that note. Since I’m using the ‘Checkin’ plugin, all notes with open tasks show up in my right side panel in Obsidian. I’ve collapsed all of these tasks, so it just is an overview of notes with an indicator of how many open tasks are in the note.

Below the open tasks, I’ve listed the ‘backlog’ of open questions and concerns, so that they can easily be scanned upon accessing the file.

Finally, below that I insert the meeting notes in a ## heading containing the date.

Client log file
Next to the project notes, I have one other log file for my work: Client log.md

This is an archive. In this note I capture things which do not belong to a specific project, but which might be interesting to be remembered of in the future.
During the day I capture 'interesting events with the same date heading.
For instance:

  • a ‘production incident’ for my application (with some details)
  • extra work added/removed from the sprint
  • an impediment the team encountered
  • unexpected leave because of xyz

Since we’re working in a Agile/Scrum way of working, every sprint we have an review meeting. It’s easy to scan this log file to see if there’s anything next to our planned sprint work to reflect on in the review meeting.

This workflow feels quite solid to me. To me it is easy to identify where to log the notes: Daily notes (personal, feelings), Project notes, Client log file.
Still, always interested to read experiences or tips from others :slight_smile:

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