For those of you who use a daily note, I’m curious as to why and how? What benefit do you derive from a daily note? I’m not especially interested in the app you are using or the fact that you are analog. My interest is focused on the how and why of having a daily note.
I’m asking in part because my Today view in Reminders (or similar view in any task manager) gives me my top todo’s for the day. It is reliable because I’m consistent with my weekly reviews.
My practice has been to depend on the Today view for my todos and to create meeting notes for all of my meetings under a given project or department, e.g, Strategic Plan, Senior Leadership Team meeting, Board meeting, etc.
Assuming you create meeting notes during the course of a day, do those reside in the daily note or do you create a backlink to the note under a project? I’ve always tended to group notes by person, project, department, etc.
I use a daily note primarily as an interstitial journal. It also lets me manually select my top 3 priorities for the day (I use Reminders as my primary tool). I record gratitude. I record my well-being. I note my Scripture focus for the day so it’s there throughout. I also use the daily note if I’m simply recording that I tried to call or visit someone with the appropriate @person tag.
(When I used Logseq I would put everything in the daily note, tagged e.g., #boardmeeting so it could be found easily. Now that I use Agenda I use notes in folders for recording meetings, interactions and writing reports and link them to the specific calendar event/reminder/date.)
I use a daily note to put mental guardrails in my day
Every morning at 7am my iPad generates a note that includes all actions for the day in my task manager, all reminders from shared lists (f.e. shopping list), all my appointments for the day and the weather report
I find having the one note gives me a focus for the day, and prevents me from opening f.e. OmniFocus to tinker with my day and get lost in re-shaping the GTD landscape.
I open the note at around 8 am and read through it while I’m enjoying my first cup of coffee.
The note stays open all day and as I finish tasks I tick them off in the note and I take extensive notes on ideas and tasks/appointments
Every evening I process the note, check off all completed items in their respective apps and process new tasks/appointments which gives me a nice closure “ceremony” for the day.
I create some backlinked notes as part of my prep, but if I get an ad-hoc meeting or have a deep discussion / provide advice during the day I’ll move them into a specific note.
Thanks for this thread - it ties in with a question that I’ve been trying to sort out recently: what’s the difference between a Daily Note and a Journal?
A daily note in the style of a journal entry at the end of the day didn’t work for me, so I’ve switched to a method called “interstitial journaling”, and I’ve been able to stick with it for 9 days consistently so far.
My daily note starts out with a list of goals I want to get done today, not necessarily everything on my todo list for the day. Just big ticket items or things that would make a huge difference in my mood if I got them knocked out today.
Then the rest of the note is a bullet-point list, with each list item starting with the current time, and then I write about whatever I’m feeling, what I’m working on right now or think I should be working on, random thoughts, references to other notes, etc. It’s helped me stay on task and resume where I’ve left off when I become distracted. And at the end of the day when I feel like I haven’t gotten much done, it helps squash that feeling by reading through the day’s events and helping me realize, actually, I did a lot.
My use is similar to @geoffaire. I do create back-linked notes for specific meetings held on that day as well as any other notes I create on that day, which are usually also back-linked to their project. For me as a project manager by trade, this method is working well. I’ve been doing this in Obsidian (indexed to DEVONThink) for the past year+.
daily news (eg. I use Chrome markdown browser extension to convert The World in brief from The Economist from a browser page to a markdown file. Then I use Hazel to import that into my Obsidian vault. If I keep doing this for years, I shall have my own archive of history
what progress I plan or have made for bigger goals (this is in addition to daily task)
when I have a chance I would conclude the daily note with a wrap up, including
my mood of the day
special issue I need to note
what achievement I made
I found that I often have to look back what I did or met with whom on which day. These are more trivial things but the daily note forces me to capture something that is not run of the mill issue and sometimes I forget until I have the habit of writing them down
In this context, for me: individual tasks are bricks; the “daily note” is a wall.
Or: my daily note allows me to log completed tasks in the context of other thoughts and events. I suppose it provides a historical record that might be of some use in the future; related notes do get picked up by future queries according to project titles and keywords. But just as important, the daily note helps me to “maintain state” as I work during the day. It gives me a single trusted space to return to after interruption, or if I’ve cultivated such deep focus that I’ve lost sense of whatever it is that comes next.
Another way to consider it: daily note = running task log + related notes + self-reflection…
I might work on a number of different projects in the course of a day— capturing things in a single daily note helps reduce the sense of fragmentation in moving between different projects/contexts/ideas. I drop a keyword, tag or project reference in the note and I can be reasonably confident that it’ll resurface when appropriate. This doesn’t mean that I only capture things in daily notes, but I’m more likely to start with something in my daily note and perhaps break out of the thought feels as if it needs to develop in its own space…
every week-day morning at 8am a shortcut runs (shortcuts app, automations tab) and populates a Draft with all the information detailed above, and then opens it up in the Drafts app. It’s really very very simple.
I think I personalised a shortcut I found elsewhere, have linked my first English version:
My current one is in Dutch but you can get the basic idea from the English version attached.
disclaimer: It’s not my idea to do it this way, think either @RosemaryOrchard or Federico Viticci said something about this on a podcast somewhere.
Standup
Each day at work we have a meeting where we talk about what we’re working on. This makes it easy for me to forget about work when I go home and then the next day I can check to see what I did or what I worked on. Since I’m a software engineer, I have a lot of tasks that I work on that I don’t accomplish in a single day. Also, I have a note for each ticket (created with a script that pulls information from Jira). Since I link to the ticket from the daily note, when I look at the ticket’s backlinks, I have a list of dates that I worked on it.
Accomplishments
Sometimes I feel like I haven’t contributed much at work, so my work log is intended to help with that. I not only write down what I accomplished, but also the nice things that people said or anything that happened that was encouraging. Then I compile the best ones into a weekly notes. I do the same thing with monthly, quarterly, and yearly. That way I don’t have to look through hundreds of daily notes with all the minutia to find my major accomplishments. This is the theory at least. I’ve done it for 4 months so far.
In the morning I record what time I went to bed the previous night and how well I slept, along with any issues such as pain, insomnia, etc. It gives me context for understanding how the day went. At the end of the day I write daily note that consists of entries for 1} blessings/ accomplishments 2) challenges/lessons learned 3) a single emoji that expresses my feeling about the day and 4) a space to just just decompress - anything interesting, how I spent my time, life reflections. I seldom look back at it but I may look for sleep or mood patterns. Altogether it closes out my day.
Before we had personal computers, iPads, smart phones (and even PDAs) we had paper planners. Usually two pages per day with the day’s schedule and task list on the left-facing page and the right-facing page dedicated for hand-written notes. Dayrunner, Daytimer, the Franklin-Covey planner; they all followed this model. The Franklin-Covey planners (still in use) label the right-facing page “Daily Notes”. In an earlier incarnation (I believe when it was called the Franklin planner and before the merger with Covey) it was labeled “Daily Record of Events”.
I think of the Daily Note in the current crop of digital note-taking apps as a modern analogue of the right-facing page of those paper planners we used to carry, with the significant advantage that the new digital versions are searchable by computer. There are no established rules as to what should go there. But as the paper planners of yore, it’s a useful place to put scraps of information, thoughts, or ideas that one encounters during the day in order to get them out of mind so that one can get on with the task at hand. I think of it as a holding place; another inbox that needs to be reviewed regularly (perhaps daily, certainly weekly) for anything I might need to follow up on or record elsewhere where it will appear when needed.
