Making the Most of Obsidian’s Daily Notes
A way to keep organized using your second brain.
At the beginning of this year, Obsidian was brought to my attention as a way to create a “second brain” by taking and organizing notes in the same system as your project organization. Obsidian allows you to open a folder on your computer as a “vault” and view your files in one clean menu, as well as add wiki-like notes.
Many people use Obsidian as a general note-taking system, creating complex webs of notes linking to each other. Obsidian has several visualization systems that allows you to look over large libraries like this in easy to comprehend ways, with webs, links, and overviews.
However, after a few months of trying out Obsidian, I found it most useful in its daily notes system. Obsidian has the option of installing several community plugins, and with only a few add-ons, Obsidian has given me an incredibly sustainable way to keep up my daily journaling habit.
Plugins
An integral part of my system is Obsidian’s community plugins. Obsidian’s community plugins are bits of code that users have written to add certain useful functions on top of the ones that are built into Obsidian. The options are so vast that even months into using Obsidian regularly, I’m still looking into the various plugins and how helpful they can be.
However, there are only three plugins I use to get the most out of Obsidian:
- Calendar: This displays a calendar sidebar on which you can see your daily notes. If a note exists, it is marked with a dot. You can then click on the date to view that note. If it doesn’t exist, clicking on the date will ask you if you would like to create the note, and will automatically create it in the appropriate folder if you do. Obsidian also allows you to make checklists, and if items are unchecked, the calendar dot will show two dots — one of them empty.
- Checklist: You can collect to-dos and have them displayed in another toolbar with this plugin. By adding #todo to the top of your checklist, you can mark them for the plugin, and they will appear beside the note. This is very helpful for collecting to-dos over the course of a week and making sure you get to them all in due time.
- Periodic Notes: This plugin allows you to keep daily, weekly, and monthly notes. You can set your default folder and format for titling these notes, and add period reviews or to-do lists.
How I use them
Using only these three plugins, I have developed a daily journaling system that has been extremely helpful in organizing my days.
Monthly notes
My organizational system is simple: I start with my monthly notes and work my way down. At the start of the month, I set a 10 minute timer and write down goals for the month. If the timer runs out and I still have ideas, I keep going. If not, I wrap it up there. The timer is just my “hack” for getting ideas flowing.
Obsidian also has an option to create templates, which I will often use to remind myself where to start. I have a few monthly templates, as I usually need a bit of variety in my brainstorming to keep my ideas fresh.
You can designate a template folder and, using CTRL + T, you can quickly bring up a template menu. Selecting a template will insert it right into your notes and you can continue writing from there.
I’ve found that a lot of the detail work of planning my projects comes down to my weekly notes, so I treat my monthly notes as a journaling exercise. Where do I hope to be in 6 months? What was I working on last month? How do I feel about it? Are there any big events I’m expecting this month?
Once I’ve jotted down all my various thoughts about the month, I move on to my weekly notes.
Weekly notes
I start my weekly notes with a #todo tag and a collection of all my to-dos so that they show up in my Checklist tab. Here, I go through specific dates, deadlines, and make a more detailed outline of each week, each big task that I plan to get to over the course of that week.
Obsidian allows you to open two notes side-by-side. This means you can leave your monthly note up while working on your weekly notes to remind yourself what you’re trying to organize.
At the start of the month, I do this for each week, then again on the respective Mondays of each week, in order to stay up to date with new information, new tasks or new project deadlines. This also means that if I have to reshuffle my to-dos, I can carry over undone tasks from a previous week.
Daily notes
I wrote an earlier article on my daily schedule system back in March, where I explained my workday-rest day system. On rest days, I simply create a to-do list and check off tasks as I do them without notes or time tracking to give my brain a chance to refresh without pressure. The note taking system below, however, has become my go-to for workdays.
As mentioned in my previous article, at the start of the day, I quickly jot down three serious tasks for the day. It doesn’t really matter how big or how small, or if I add more tasks as I go. These are simply my minimum tasks I want to work on. Sometimes I will simply split my weekly to-do list up among days, other times I’ll reference my weekly notes as I go. As mentioned before, flexibility allows me to keep my mind fresh and focused.
From there, use a reverse time-blocking system.
As I begin work on something, I note down the time, and I attach a tag that describes what I’m doing. Obsidian’s tag system allows you to quickly search on tags and look over your previous notes, providing a quick overview of which days you’ve worked on that task and an easy way to pop into any note containing that tag to look at what you were thinking about it. You can also add tags to the map feature for a quick visual of how often that tag appears, which notes it’s been used in, and what else it’s connected to.
For example, let’s say I’m putting in an hour of writing at noon. I start my journal entry with:
++ 12:00, #writing
(I use the ++ because this is a bullet point that Obsidian doesn’t autoformat, which I prefer, but everyone has their own formatting preferences. Have fun with it! See what looks nice, what feels clean and organized to you.)
As I work on the task, I jot down any notes or thoughts I might have. When I’ve completed, I wrap it up by writing down what I accomplished and what I did, then close it out with another timestamp. To keep things neat, miscellaneous thoughts I want to jot down but which are unrelated to tasks go in the end notes.
For example:
I keep adding tasks as I do them over the course of the day, until I’ve put all of my notes, tasks and journaling into these blocks.
Then, at the end of the day, I use a calendar app (such as Google Calendar) to record what I was doing all day. This helps me see when I am most focused, what’s eating up the most time or energy in my day, and where my time goes. It’s also simply rewarding to see the work you’ve put in over the day!
Obsidian is an excellent tool for organizing your thoughts, and I absolutely recommend exploring all of its tools. I hope that with this look into how I use it to organize my days, more people are inspired to revamp their own organizational systems. Once you get into the habit, it’s an incredibly relaxing way to stay focused and productive!
