Tbh I think at the end of the day all these different organisation methods are mostly interchangeable. The one benefit I see in tags is that you can associate a note with multiple notes rather than just one which isn’t easy to do with folders.
I've struggled with what to put in daily notes consistently. I have seen many people use it to document what they did that day, but in my hands, it feels either redundant (since I have the equivalent amount of detail in its own note) or superfluous (yeah I know I paid the bills, my accounts shrunk accordingly). This was also a symptom of my earlier ventures in setting a PKM workflow that was either too regimented and stifling (too many folders) or too loose and unorganized (just links and tags).
I took Nick Milo's advice and started building the vault from the ground up, testing what I use in terms of plugins and templates and figuring out the right amount of organization that feels satisfying without precluding the ability to discover links between notes. Nick had mentioned the ACCESS framework a couple of times and that is the one that I've settled on quite happily as a middle ground between folders and tags/links. My daily notes are officially a taskboard (setting up different dataview queries to search for tags like #work, #home, etc in callouts) with a section under for New Tasks if I think of other tasks to add quickly and they remain in the Daily Notes folder. If I have spontaneous ideas to write down as fleeting notes, I take advantage of the core plugin Unique note creator to use a minimal template to jot things down and placed into an Ideas folder. The cool thing is that Daily Notes have a YYYY-MM-DD format, while the fleeting notes have the Zettlekasten prefix YYYYMMDDHHmmss, so it's easy to differentiate between the two. Next thing I am considering is using the Dice Roller plugin to show a random fleeting note from the Dieas folder at the bottom of my Daily Notes template, so it makes a fleeting notes link visible, in case I have time to revisit it and change it to a regular note or scrap.
Date-named daily notes work for me because they are connected to other notes where date matters: reading logs, an-ongoing literature study whose documents change in a date-ordered manner, etc. Also, because my daily notes link off to topic notes that are not-date bound. My daily note template includes links back to same-date-one-year-ago and same-date-two-years ago daily notes so I can at a glance see what I was up to. (Sort of a home-made version of what the DayOne app does automatically.) And, I just like date-sequenced logs. I've managed to sustain a daily-note practice in Obsidian since Obsidian was released, and I'm happy with the result. Trying to do the same on paper, BUJOing or other methods, has always been a total failure for me.
I've been using Themed Logs since your previous article about them and they have greatly simplified tracking things (movies, books, trips, and even work)! I still use Daily Notes but that is mostly to organize my day, which in my mind solves a different problem. I replaced many Dataview tables with Themed Logs as I wanted my notes to be readable outside of Obsidian without relying on plugins.
I would also love to see some examples of how you organize your themed logs. I have some as bullet points with a simple "<date>: <content>" format and others where each date is a heading and bullet points under it for the actual logs.
Mostly I use the " * date info" style but I use headings followrd by violets for longer stuff like meeting notes or gardening stuff where I plant a lot of things in different spots, it varies by content.
100-day streak of anything? Awesome; I'm still working on that. I'm in the same boat on Daily Notes; never get back to organizing so I'm (slowly) deleting them as they appear. And I recently started using written log books for different activities, which I had been using years ago. Still struggling about how many places to use for the information I want to keep, how much of it is hand-written (I love the feel of writing and the connections it makes for me) or computer-written (it's much more efficient that way). Back and forth; back and forth; the pendulum keeps swinging as I work to find the right balance for me: I think it's some of both.
I did Brand plug-in free for a while to see which plugins really mattered to me. I like to keep my plug-in count as low as possible so I don't have to worry too much about updates causing problems.
To do it, I just spun up a new vault in obsidian and didn't turn off safe mode, then copied my files over into the new folder.
me too. my daily note still hangs on as an aggregator (via the backlinks) of other notes I touched that day. well I do use ios shortcuts to paste in my agenda for the day from the calendar too. themed logs are where all the action happens though.
FWIW, I do a bit of both. I keep a daily note using a mash up structure of Matthew Dicks’ “Homework for Life” and Billy Collins’ “Lists of Twenty.” Keeping a daily note forces me to be more present and it’s useful when I want to remember exactly when something happened. For everything else that I want to remember/keep/reference, it goes into Obsidian with a tag and backlink (if appropriate). I then either search by tag or use DataView to make a simple TOC. Not sure it that’s similar to your log, tho.
Billy Collins is a poet and his list technique is advice not a system. Some friends and I use it because it's a good form for writing to each other. BIlly's advice is, "There's another little exercise you can do that I think could be helpful. And that is at the end of the day, or-- or the morning of the following day, just take a piece of paper and write down 20 things you did the day before, or that day. And use a very simple form-- I did this, I did that. I washed the dishes, I ate an avocado, I read the newspaper, I got a phone call telling me my uncle died." and you can find it here: https://www.masterclass.com/classes/billy-collins-teaches-reading-and-writing-poetry/chapters/writing-the-poem#transcript
LOL! I've tried so hard to do some kind of daily notes. Not going to happen. Even those on-the-fly reading or searching unattached bits, I put into Readwise with a comment to remind me why I wanted to keep it or as a container for my reflections around it.
Daily notes seem to run against how brains work -- to find things they need connections in networks. I'm always amazed when people can find things by date.
"It's seeing a collection of disjointed articles in one place so I can look for patterns." Love the sound of this idea, though I'm not sure what that would look like in real life.
Not that it sounds like you need it, but the app Llama Life is pretty much what you describe. A list of things that can be categorized (or not), then selected for today. Nothing complicated. I do use this to not lose the small things and because it can travel with me. Like a written list with a timer to keep me focused ;-)
Tbh I think at the end of the day all these different organisation methods are mostly interchangeable. The one benefit I see in tags is that you can associate a note with multiple notes rather than just one which isn’t easy to do with folders.
I've struggled with what to put in daily notes consistently. I have seen many people use it to document what they did that day, but in my hands, it feels either redundant (since I have the equivalent amount of detail in its own note) or superfluous (yeah I know I paid the bills, my accounts shrunk accordingly). This was also a symptom of my earlier ventures in setting a PKM workflow that was either too regimented and stifling (too many folders) or too loose and unorganized (just links and tags).
I took Nick Milo's advice and started building the vault from the ground up, testing what I use in terms of plugins and templates and figuring out the right amount of organization that feels satisfying without precluding the ability to discover links between notes. Nick had mentioned the ACCESS framework a couple of times and that is the one that I've settled on quite happily as a middle ground between folders and tags/links. My daily notes are officially a taskboard (setting up different dataview queries to search for tags like #work, #home, etc in callouts) with a section under for New Tasks if I think of other tasks to add quickly and they remain in the Daily Notes folder. If I have spontaneous ideas to write down as fleeting notes, I take advantage of the core plugin Unique note creator to use a minimal template to jot things down and placed into an Ideas folder. The cool thing is that Daily Notes have a YYYY-MM-DD format, while the fleeting notes have the Zettlekasten prefix YYYYMMDDHHmmss, so it's easy to differentiate between the two. Next thing I am considering is using the Dice Roller plugin to show a random fleeting note from the Dieas folder at the bottom of my Daily Notes template, so it makes a fleeting notes link visible, in case I have time to revisit it and change it to a regular note or scrap.
Date-named daily notes work for me because they are connected to other notes where date matters: reading logs, an-ongoing literature study whose documents change in a date-ordered manner, etc. Also, because my daily notes link off to topic notes that are not-date bound. My daily note template includes links back to same-date-one-year-ago and same-date-two-years ago daily notes so I can at a glance see what I was up to. (Sort of a home-made version of what the DayOne app does automatically.) And, I just like date-sequenced logs. I've managed to sustain a daily-note practice in Obsidian since Obsidian was released, and I'm happy with the result. Trying to do the same on paper, BUJOing or other methods, has always been a total failure for me.
I've been using Themed Logs since your previous article about them and they have greatly simplified tracking things (movies, books, trips, and even work)! I still use Daily Notes but that is mostly to organize my day, which in my mind solves a different problem. I replaced many Dataview tables with Themed Logs as I wanted my notes to be readable outside of Obsidian without relying on plugins.
I would also love to see some examples of how you organize your themed logs. I have some as bullet points with a simple "<date>: <content>" format and others where each date is a heading and bullet points under it for the actual logs.
Mostly I use the " * date info" style but I use headings followrd by violets for longer stuff like meeting notes or gardening stuff where I plant a lot of things in different spots, it varies by content.
100-day streak of anything? Awesome; I'm still working on that. I'm in the same boat on Daily Notes; never get back to organizing so I'm (slowly) deleting them as they appear. And I recently started using written log books for different activities, which I had been using years ago. Still struggling about how many places to use for the information I want to keep, how much of it is hand-written (I love the feel of writing and the connections it makes for me) or computer-written (it's much more efficient that way). Back and forth; back and forth; the pendulum keeps swinging as I work to find the right balance for me: I think it's some of both.
Thanks for this article!
The pendulum always seems to swing!
You mentioned putting your vault in safe mode and doing a controlled reimport. Why and how did you do that?
I did Brand plug-in free for a while to see which plugins really mattered to me. I like to keep my plug-in count as low as possible so I don't have to worry too much about updates causing problems.
To do it, I just spun up a new vault in obsidian and didn't turn off safe mode, then copied my files over into the new folder.
me too. my daily note still hangs on as an aggregator (via the backlinks) of other notes I touched that day. well I do use ios shortcuts to paste in my agenda for the day from the calendar too. themed logs are where all the action happens though.
FWIW, I do a bit of both. I keep a daily note using a mash up structure of Matthew Dicks’ “Homework for Life” and Billy Collins’ “Lists of Twenty.” Keeping a daily note forces me to be more present and it’s useful when I want to remember exactly when something happened. For everything else that I want to remember/keep/reference, it goes into Obsidian with a tag and backlink (if appropriate). I then either search by tag or use DataView to make a simple TOC. Not sure it that’s similar to your log, tho.
I'm not familiar with those systems; I'll check them out!
Billy Collins is a poet and his list technique is advice not a system. Some friends and I use it because it's a good form for writing to each other. BIlly's advice is, "There's another little exercise you can do that I think could be helpful. And that is at the end of the day, or-- or the morning of the following day, just take a piece of paper and write down 20 things you did the day before, or that day. And use a very simple form-- I did this, I did that. I washed the dishes, I ate an avocado, I read the newspaper, I got a phone call telling me my uncle died." and you can find it here: https://www.masterclass.com/classes/billy-collins-teaches-reading-and-writing-poetry/chapters/writing-the-poem#transcript
It's in the seventh para of the Preview.
LOL! I've tried so hard to do some kind of daily notes. Not going to happen. Even those on-the-fly reading or searching unattached bits, I put into Readwise with a comment to remind me why I wanted to keep it or as a container for my reflections around it.
Daily notes seem to run against how brains work -- to find things they need connections in networks. I'm always amazed when people can find things by date.
"It's seeing a collection of disjointed articles in one place so I can look for patterns." Love the sound of this idea, though I'm not sure what that would look like in real life.
Not that it sounds like you need it, but the app Llama Life is pretty much what you describe. A list of things that can be categorized (or not), then selected for today. Nothing complicated. I do use this to not lose the small things and because it can travel with me. Like a written list with a timer to keep me focused ;-)
I'll check out Llama life, thanks for the tip!