Introduction
This will be the first in a series of articles and videos around the Obsidian Daily Notes core plugin. Personal Knowledge Management systems provide a very powerful way to do journalling and keep information that is detailed and extensive. Yet the ability to fold headings and use callouts in Obsidian also provides the ability to give Daily Notes a compact appearance where you only have to access the information you need.
This series will be quite detailed and provide many options, in fact so many that they would be way too big for one article or video which is why they are being broken into segments. This introduction will list what is coming and if you are referring back at some later time, the topics will have been edited and converted to links for a particular section.
What Will Be Covered
The list below will be covered on an individual basis and they all go to making up my personal Daily Note. Here is an screenshot of my collapsed Daily Note with all the headings.
Daily Note Content
- A summary of my activities for the last week from a plugin timetracker
- A callout to remind me of articles I am intending to write using a tag
- A list of tasks from the Tasks plugin that have a future date or no date
- A list of tasks that should be done today
- A report from my time tracker plugin of what I have done today plus my own notes that I wish to record
- A list, including links, of podcasts I’ve listened to, videos I’ve watched and reading I have done in the professional development space.
- Any ideas I have had which are then pushed to a separate Ideas note as tasks for the future
- Today’s wins is a note celebrating my wins for the day
- A note on things I am grateful for to enhance gratitude practice
- A note on anything I’m struggling with and what I intend to do about it
- The Notes area has two callouts showing all my new notes I have created today and a second callout showing all the notes I worked on today.
Although this may seem a considerable amount of information for a Daily Note, most of it is automated and I also use bullet points a lot unless I want to record my emotions at a point in time. All of this comes together in the Daily Note template that will be available.
Topics to be Discussed
- The Great Unfolding – Video will show all the sections of my Daily Note
- Setting up Your Daily Notes Template
- Using the Calendar Plugin to Create Daily Notes
- Using a Free Time Tracker Plugin for Obsidian and Generating Automatic Reports
- Creating Dataview Callouts Using Tags
- Creating Lists of Tasks from a Query with Tasks Plugin
- Pushing Tasks from One Obsidian Note to Another Automatically
Conclusion
Daily notes or journals are great for reflection and introspection. I have found that the longer I have kept a journal, the more valuable it becomes. You also become more skilled at writing the Daily Notes and will probably build on the content. The detail in my Daily Note did not occur overnight, but is a product of time. It is only since beginning to use Obsidian that I have been able to expand my Daily Note from what was earlier a simple journal entry in some other software.
I look forward to your company on this journey with Daily Notes, your comments and your questions. Your comments and experience can only contribute to the discussion and will no doubt help others on this path.
