My Obsidian Daily Note
Rob Coles
Why have a daily note?
I wanted to have a place where I could plan and track what I was doing through the day. I’ve experimented with kanban boards, pomodoro, Eisenhower matrix, and various other productivity techniques. The approach that has worked best for me was timeboxing. When I was working, I’d use the daily note to timebox my day and follow progress in the right hand sidebar with the Day Planner plug in. I have recently retired and am not currently timeboxing. I still have appointments and tasks that I need to do, and the existing format still works for me even though my day is not as structured as it was.
The note also acts as a record of what I’ve done, and when I include references to notes in my ‘maps of content’ (MOCs) I split the sections so that one journal references are seperated out. I have bases that pull out summary and habit information for the week, quarter and year as well.
How is it created?
I am a programmer and I wanted to pull in information from Google Calendar and a variety of other sources. This is probably achievable with templater and other plugins. I just have a python script generated with help from Claude code that takes an Obsidian template and replaces placeholders with retrieved information like my calendar entries for today and tomorrow, carried forward tasks from yesterday’s note etc.
The process
First thing in the morning I’ll create the note. This is currently manual. With the recent announcement of the Obsidian CLI I’m planning to automate this, but the current sync restrictions (I use Obsidian sync) mean I need to open the Obsidian client to sync the note anyway so the manual creation isn’t much of an issue. I’ll look at yesterday’s note and make sure the habit and summary sections are complete, then pin the current day’s daily note. This stays open all day.
I’ll make a rough plan for the day, moving tasks up and down in the list in a priority. I use the Anuppucin theme which lets me flag checkboxes with more than just “done” and I use a modified bullet journal system if I decide I’m explicitly deferring something for example.
If “past Rob” has been over-ambitious and the combination of unfinished tasks from yesterday and today’s tasks are clearly not going to be achievable, I’ll either section some off, or sometimes write a “Must, Should, Could” plan on a 3" x 5" card and work from that.
Through the day, tasks are checked off, habits noted and anything else of interest is either noted or linked here. I use the “task collector” plugin periodically during the day to move completed or deferred tasks to the end of the daily note and keep the working section uncluttered.
At the end of the day I’ll fill out the summary, gratitude, highlight, “today I learnt” and timeline sections if there is anything appropriate. I use the Meta bind plugin extensively here, so I can maintain text and habits inline, but have the data stored as frontmatter so Obsidian bases and Datacore can access them.
Sections
Header and Navigation
The top line is a simple navigator. Bright blue links are clickable, and represent yesterday, the current week, the current quarter and tomorrow. Tomorrow’s note doesn’t exist yet so is a slightly more muted blue.
Below that is the Noongar word for the current season. I am trying to learn Noongar, which is the language of the local aboriginal tribe in Perth and this is a reminder. The countdown to Christmas is really a placeholder. This was updated during last year to the date of my son’s wedding, then our holiday, then Christmas and there’s nothing else momentous so far this year.
“On this day” is a call-out that will display the “Summary” section from this date across all of the years I have data.
I had been keeping a physical “Line a day” journal which I am in the process of digitising, so it is not yet complete, but I am catching up slowly. This is collapsed by default.
“Quest” if there is one, comes from the quarterly note and tends to be a higher level thing. Both of the current entries are from the “Theme” note. I have read Mike Vardy’s work and am experimenting with daily theming. I have recently retired, so these are now more personal than they used to be. I am still playing with this.
Summary and Highlight are completed every day and I have Obsidian “bases” that will list them that I look through weekly, quarterly, and as a part of my annual review. The Summary entry is what’s shown in the “On this day” section above. I also have an entry for “Timeline” which had to be something special and again there is a separate base view to pull these out for the annual review.
Task Management
The task management section used to be more structured, as I used time boxing and the Obsidian Day Planner plug in when I was working. The day planner section is just calendar entries now.
The progress bar is a small piece of Obsidian Datacore code that just adds up the checkboxes on the page and how many of those are complete. I aim for 75% but don’t always get there.
Day Planner
The entries between the “Day Planner” heading and the solid line are retrieved from my Google calendar. Below the solid line are tasks that I have flagged with today’s date, set for today as part of my weekly planning, or been carried forward from yesterday if they were incomplete. The “(CF:x)” at the end of some of the lines is an indication of how many days the line has been carried forward, in an attempt to shame me into doing them.
Could
This an Obsidian base view showing tasks that are next highest priority but were not specifically set for today or carried over. If I finish what was explicitly planned for today, I’ll look here for the next task. These tasks will all appear in the weekly planning list if they have not been completed or had an explicit date set. I use a modified version of “The secret weapon” for prioritisation, as I have come from Evernote/GTD so these are all tasks tagged as “1-Next”.
This Week
Is a call-out that is collapsed by default, and contains a bases view of the next level of priority. This is the “2-ThisWeek” tag. I can pick something from here if I’ve finished today’s selected tasks, but it is more for reference in case one of the tasks suddenly becomes more urgent. These tasks will also appear in the weekly planning. Weekly planning lets me look at the outstanding tasks and assign them to a specific day for the coming week. I don’t plan in more detail than that.
Habit Tracking
I track a few habits, and these change over time. Once the habit is ingrained I drop it from here, but these are the current ones.
Because I want to be able to surface them in Obsidian bases views, these are all stored as frontmatter, but I use the Meta bind plugin to make looking at them and maintaining them easier.
There are a few regular things that I track that are more weekly than daily, e.g. “JGLesson Minutes”. The Weekly note tracks these and I have a helper script to enter these consistently. For this one I’m aiming for 60 minutes a week, so this can appear on one or more days.
“Today I learnt” and “Gratitude” are experiments. Just free text.
The summary table is another Obsidian base that just shows me how I was doing for the last week. One of my weekly targets is to have at least one “all green day” where I have hit all of the habits. It also highlights where I have forgotten something - I occasionally miss the steps count. Some of my habits are “x days a week” rather than every day, but being able to see everything green is an incentive.
This chart used to be a dataview query but I have replaced it with a base, which also means I can update the step count in the base itself if necessary.
The rest
After the habits are sections that are more reference or optional, or something I’m experimenting with.
Tomorrow
This is a collapsable callout that is just a heads up for calendar items and tasks that are specifically planned for tomorrow.
Note Gardening
This callout contains links to 3 random notes and the 3 oldest looked at notes. I flag notes with my own “last viewed” date (via a shortcut key) since the operating system date can change for other reasons. These are the 3 notes I actually looked at the longest ago. I don’t always look at this section, it depends how the day goes, but it and the “random wikipedia page” immediately below it are there as a more healthy alternative to doomscrolling if I have a few spare minutes. The gardening process is described in more detail in this blog post
Today’s Files
Is another Obsidian base view just showing files created today. It gets the date for today from the page filename which is just the date in ISO format, so it is accurate historically (subject to the filesystem).
Timespan
This is something I saw Mike Schmitz using and is a Datacore query looking at where we are in time. A bit of a memento mori.
Completed
This is empty in the screenshot, but I use the Task Collector plug in to move completed or deferred tasks from the main body of the list to the end of the file to keep the remaining tasks obvious. I can review these at the end of the day when I’m maintaining the Summary and Highlight sections.
And that’s my current daily note. It changes over time, and I’m still experimenting with some of the sections but this note is open for me whenever Obsidian is open. I hope it gives you some ideas. I pull content in, and feed information back to weekly and quarterly notes. I’ll cover those in another post.
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