I’ve tried at various points to do dailies with different formats and such, but I’m apparently a boring person because I don’t have much to write about on a daily basis. I don’t like using Obsidian for really personal-ish stuff like journaling because it’s all plain-text and I haven’t bothered to encrypt everything. I do use it for taking notes or writing out notes on personal projects I’m working on or new concepts I come across or just general things I want to remember (things I wouldn’t care if somebody stumbled across it). Daily sort of “What did I do this day” notes are kind of weird to me, since nothing of note happens most days and I’m not anticipating being called into court to recount what happened.

I picked up one thing from Nick Milo’s Ideaverse starter vault (or Linking Your Thinking or whatever it’s called now), it’s the idea of “Efforts”. It’s essentially another way of saying “Projects”, but maybe less formal and encapsulates anything and everything I might be working on, dealing with, or putting effort into. If I have to write a paper, brainstorm something, car maintenance, an ongoing responsibility, something needs repaired, I have a dream project, or whatever, I create an effort note and tag it as either Hot, Ongoing, Simmering, or Sleeping, depending on what’s going on with it at the moment. Then I use Dataview tables to sort them on my home note.

For a while I had daily notes that had a dataview linking to other notes created on the same day as the daily note, then I had a weekly note that linked to all my daily notes created during that week number. The note itself was a place to centralize links to other notes, jot down what was going on, stuff like that.

In the end, it was creating more work than I wanted to do and I wasn’t finding myself going back to review those daily or weekly notes. When I’m creating notes I never look at again, I know I’m wasting my time.

I call what I’m doing “time journalling,” but that might not be the correct term. Every day I get a new note, I have a keyboard shortcut that puts in the time, and I write what I’m doing. I also have a template for meetings. I use a global shortcut to bring up this note no matter what desktop I’m in, so I always have a note taking surface an ‘F10’ away.

Next, I have “work tracking” notes. In my example below is “LRSF 2024”. So any time I’m working on that I just link to it from my daily note and for the most part, that note just exists so I can scroll through all the work I’ve done on that project using the “Linked mentions” section.

I also have some tags like “PersonalComputing” if it’s related to making something on my computer work, or another tag if it’s a fun/interesting story I might want to remember.

The overhead of this system feels a bit high, but, I have been sticking with it since December or so. I’d say it has been most useful for answering questions like “What happened this day?” I have been able to find things related to work by linking to work tracking notes, but, I’m not sure how that’s going to scale as time goes on.

Actually, a second thing I’m not sure about - I haven’t been very good about integrating information I want to keep accessible long-term in with my other notes. It used to be if I figured something out about ‘ibus’ (for example), I’d add it to some “Linux desktop” note. I’m more likely now to just let it live in my daily notes. On the one hand, I might be more likely to write things down because there isn’t the friction of going to find the right note and worrying about formatting. On the other hand, it seems likely this information will get harder to find if it all lives in date-titled notes.

Anyway, so that’s all my “work” vault. I do something similar for a “Journalling” vault, but I’m not as happy with that setup.

A late addition: I also like using check boxes for things I need to get back to - it’s super fast to do and lets me get back to it later. You can search for unchecked check boxes, so at my weekly review I have a saved search that shows me all the things I thought I should do. Then I either do them or move them to my to-do app. This way I know if there’s an unchecked check box in my “DailyLog” folder, it needs attention.

I don’t use dailies either. I use monthlies to track my shorter term goals or incremental steps for my long terms. My sections tend to be something along the lines of "what changed, what is my current standpoint, how does this affect my strategy, what did I do well, what did I not do well, did I do anything memorable? " My monthlies quote my annuals so I always read through them prior to writing anything down. My annuals quote my “core principles” which is a list of things I value most in life.

I feel like anything shorter than a month goes better in my task app or on my calendar.

But that’s just me. I’m also curious what others have to say.