Multiple Obsidian Daily Note Folders in One Vault?

Software
1

I’m currently using one vault for Obsidian. I use the daily note feature to log work items. I’d like to have a separate daily note for personal notes/journaling. Is it possible to do this in one vault? I don’t see how.

Or would I need to setup two separate vaults: Work and Personal, In order to have two separate daily notes? MacSparky today suggested you could definitely do it in one vault but I don’t see how.

Thanks

2

I was considering doing the same!

You can totally go the two vault route (it’s probably the safest way) but if you really want to keep one vault (I certainly do) I think you could.

Here’s what I thought. Add this line to your daily note template:

[[Personal Daily Notes/{{date:yyyy-MM-DD}}|Today's Personal Note]]

Note that this approach will result in this:

  1. It will create a Personal Daily Notes folder on which you have your Personal DNs saved;
  2. Every file will have its own 2022-01-21 format (courtesy of the template plugin);
  3. It will only create the personal note if clicked from the link on the “Work Daily Note” (this can be a problem on non-work days).

The final item can be worked around by making the Personal DN the default and inserting a link to create the Work DN… but that will result in the DN hotkey to be tied to the personal, not the work DN. Personally, I rather have a shortcut to my Work DN as I refer to it so many times during the day.

EDIT: to fix the curly bracket pointed by @anon41602260, thanks!

2 Likes
3

I think this is a very clever situation.

But, if you flip the circumstances and use the daily notes for personal entries, include your line in the daily note template, and make it

[[Work Daily Notes /{{date:yyyy-MM-DD}}|Today's Work Note]]

Then, since you “always” have a personal note, you invoke creation of the less common workday daily note from the personal note instead of the other way around.

(BTW, you had too many right-hand curly brackets in your posted suggestion.)

I haven’t tested this – so YMMV

Another option is to use the “Templater” community plugin and create a template that can be invoked from the sidebar or the command popover (⌘P) to create work note as needed.

3 Likes
4

Yeah, I thought about this flip, but in the end I gave up because of the DN shortcut:

I need to navigate to the daily work note very often… so I guess I’ll keep it that way.

Will take a deeper look at Templater, as I’m sure that can enable a lot more than I’m used to with the Core Plugin. Thanks!

5

I’m curious if there have been any changes to Obsidian or new plugins that might make this easier? I asked this question in a linking your thinking conference a while back and I believe someone said that was a future feature.

6

I recently started using QuickAdd’s capture choice to add daily notes to specific locations. If you use a template and set a custom format for the captured content to be nothing (this skips the input prompt when you execute the command), then it pretty much operates just like the daily note and you can use the command palette or add a hotkey to create and/or open an existing daily note at the specified location.

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