One note per thought vs Daily Note

While many people seem to be moving from Daily Notes to Weekly or even Monthly Notes, I’m experimenting with going the other way.

I’ve been creating an individual note for each thought, action or interaction through the day. I use the Unique Note core plugin. So I may create notes like:

202408260935 Met with Bill to discuss the plumbing issues
202408261115 idea for discussion- You are only as old as your last confession
202408261215 Lunch with Tom Bryson
202408261512 Completed reading War and Peace

The idea is to have a meaningful title so I can skim through them later and immediately see what I’ve been doing and thinking over the last few weeks. Notes which are “dead” and of no more use can simply be deleted at some point. This clean up is harder to do with daily notes.

Each note can contain tags so a unique note can be converted to a permanent/evergreen note or simply be findable by some criteria eg #booknote. Similarly text can include links to sources, cut and paste articles, documents etc.

Some notes could contain nothing if the title says it all.

All this can be done in the daily note, but I feel this gives much more visibility to individual items and better manageability of the generated information. It also makes separate ideas more readily linkable with each other.

I don’t track tasks in obsidian.

Thoughts?

1 Like

…citation needed?

I’m curious how you can come to conclusions about user trends in journals. :blush:

I do keep a monthly journal. But almost exactly like you, I also often use the Unique note creator plugin, and use a template of YYYY-MM-DD-HHmm. And I set a hotkey so I can quickly make unique notes in a special folder. I usually stick a brief word or phrase in the title too.

Example: 2023-07-05-1852 Chili Oil Recipe. I like dashes to make the date a bit more readable and ISO friendly.

So my journal is more for just random logs and thoughts. And things that feel like ideas, links, or concepts or seeds for more research become separate notes.

I guess, what thoughts? If you just need some validation, then here: Great idea! Keep at it! :slight_smile:

How does creating individual notes for each thought, action, or interaction throughout the day improve information visibility and manageability compared to using daily notes?

Each note is its own, atomic thing, with its title being descriptive.

It’s easy to scan down the notes for the last few weeks just using the file system. It’s easy to review notes periodically with a review plugin. It’s easy to delete notes that are no longer relevant or move them elsewhere in the filing system. It’s easy to expand notes later because they’re not stuck in a daily note and therefore time bound.

I appreciate all this can be done by extracting from a daily note; this cuts out a step. I have gone back to using daily notes for brain dumps and interstitial journaling, none of which I’ll typically ever look at again.

Daily notes work better in apps like Logseq and Roam where each block is a first-class citizen. In Obsidian pages are the first-class citizen, and therefore to my mind it makes more sense to use page based storage rather than block/list/paragraph.

(I’d still be using Logseq if it wasn’t so infuriatingly buggy)

Of course, our brains are all wired differently!
https://forum.obsidian.md/t/one-note-per-thought-vs-daily-note/87455
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