My relationship with daily notes is complicated.
When I first started using Obsidian, I practically lived in my daily notes. Often I would go about my day writing down almost every fleeting thought I had. I even developed a daily notes first workflow in Obsidian, using it as a scratch pad and starting point for ideation.
As the years went by, I started realizing that I very rarely would look back through my old daily notes and read them like memoirs.
Eventually, I began to feel obligated to write daily notes just to keep the streak going.
This is not to say having a journal to brain dump into isn’t useful—in fact, I believe it is a necessity.
I now occasionally do morning reflections in an analog journal as needed. I am a tactile learner so putting ink to paper is incredibly effective way for me to commit knowledge to memory.
You can read my article here for more on discovering your learning modalities.
Over the past year, I’ve made the switch to writing most of my daily notes on the go in my Field Notes pocket notebook.
Since I take my Field Notes with me everywhere, I often do flip through it and read my older entries. This helps reinforce my memory of important events and ideas that I jotted down, which was not the case for my digital daily notes.
Naturally, going analog changed the way I use daily notes in Obsidian—as I continued to observe my logbook and index, I noticed that a majority of what I was writing about involved my creative projects.
Experiencing the benefits of this practice also led to “cracking the code” of digital zettelkasten as I began to build an analog zettelkasten. As my analog notebox quickly grew, so did the way I integrated Obsidian into my hybrid PKM workflow.
I still can’t go without daily notes in Obsidian, even as my workflow has evolved. I use my daily notes
- As creative journal to reflect upon my thoughts, mood and progress as I write my outputs in Obsidian
- To log any events or meetings that occurred that day
- To establish intent on what writing project I am working on for the day
- As an end of day log to review my creative flow
I practice interstitial journaling, a simple productivity technique created by Tony Stubblebine. Interstitial journaling involves a combination of time tracking with memos. Here is an example from one of my daily notes.