I’m with you. I’d like to have a great use for the feature but my work mainly consists of very long running projects and the critical time sensitive thing I have to do every day is just to make significant progress on them. I do journal at the end of the day about what I have learned in my process but I have no use for daily notes. It’s fine, I don’t think every workflow has use for them (even though they’re very fashionable these days).
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Clever. I imagine this is not just weather? Do you have any examples?
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No weather. In fact for a while I was grabbing weather and headline information for my daily note with various JSON APIs, then realized I don’t care what the weather and news was in the past, because I can find it out about weather and news from any day in the past from my friend Google. So I just limit the script to setting up links and content from databases and libraries for my own studies, which matter to me more.
Thanks everyone for the kind and helpful perspectives. I’ll give this more thought. There may be a useful place for the daily note, perhaps as more of a journaling/thinking exercise than a dashboard. I use my calendar and task management app for my dashboard.
Thanks again!
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I think this entirely depends on your workflow. I am a doctoral student in a theoretical science so my day consists of (1) almost no meetings; and (2) uninterrupted chunks of work with very high concentration (à la Cal Newport’s Deep Work).
I use the Daily Note for the following:
- Planning my day via time-blocking. It’s not perfect, but I often have a good idea of what I’m going to do that day-- the difficulty is how much time it will take. It’s a learning process, I recently switched fields so I’m not as good at time estimates as I once was. I use Obsidian’s Day Planner plugin for this.
- Collecting a summary of what I did that day, questions for my advisor, questions for myself (i.e. stuff I don’t understand) and a broad next actions list to discuss with my advisor.
- Some “Lab Notebook” style notes.
(1) and (2) are self-explanatory, but (3) might seem redundant, why not keep a note for each topic I work on? Well, I do! But a lab notebook needs to be chronological and datestamped, so I use the daily notes to fill that function.
For Example, here’s what a typical note might look like (I just came up with this, they’re usually more complex. The physics is real though!)
(YAML front matter with just tags)
(some navigation stuff)
(links to OmniFocus perspectives)Day Planner
(Some day planning stuff where my day is broken up into slots and each slot is assigned a task from my OmniFocus Mission Critical perspective)
Lists
Summary
- Perform spin texture calculations on [[Bi2Te3]]
- Read Section II of [[Fang2013]]
Questions for Advisor
- Why does the Z2 invariant require a smooth gauge across the whole BZ?
- Can I get a new M1 MacBook?
Lingering Questions
- Revise the proof of A-[[Time-Reversal Invariant Momenta|TRIM]] vs B-TRIM
Next Actions
- Determine the Energy of the Dirac Point w.r.t the Fermi Level
Notes
Today, I performed a [[Density Functional Theory|density functional theory]] calculation of [[Bi2Te3|Bi$_2$Te$_3$]] to obtain the [[Spin Textures in DFT|spin textures]]. As shown in the figures below, we see that we have proper spin-momentum locking, as expected, and the [[Dirac Point]] occurs at ==XXX== eV w.r.t. the Fermi level.
![[Figure 1]]
![[Figure 2]]Moreover, I took extensive notes on the paper by [[Fang2013|Fang et al.]], namely on Section II regarding the proof of [[Kramers Theorem|Kramers’ degeneracy]] by symmetry.
Now the power of this comes when it’s time for my weekly meeting with my advisor. I have a weekly note that, using DataView and DataViewJS will do the following:
- Creates a table with all the tags from the week’s daily notes, arranged by frequency of occurrence, so I know what topics I worked on the most.
- Collates the “summary”, “questions for advisor”, “lingering questions” and “next actions” lists into one big list for each.
- (To Be Done) Collect all figures from the week’s daily notes into a section of their own
That way, when I work on my weekly PIDoc (principal investigator document, an agenda-like document for meetings with my advisor), I have everything I need in my weekly note! It takes less than 5 minutes to cobble together the PI doc and I’m basically done.
I hope someone finds this helpful, and sorry for the messy writing-- I started writing this at 7 AM 
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I also think the Calendar end Task Manager combo suit my needs better than using the Daily Note in Obsidian, as discussed here and here.
That said, I still find value in Daily Notes as they encourage me to write more about things that either don’t fit into an existing note or are more on the personal/subjective side of considerations.
So I use it in two ways:
-
As a way to capture things I read and find somewhat interesting but still don’t have a place among my more “permanent notes”. So they can be found via either search or unlinked mentions in the future (just used a bunch of these notes in preparation for a writing a paper yesterday!);
-
As a journal into which I register my personal and subjective notes about projects or other concept-notes. So these considerations do not clutter the note itself, but are still addressable in the future via the backlinks pane in Obsidian (those also can be filtered out by inserting
-tag:daily-notethere). This way I can be more realistic when looking back into a project note about how much time I’ve spent working on this and how good or bad I feel about doing this.
In Charles Duhigg’s Smarter, Faster, Better: there was a quote that helped me frame this properly: we should create the habit of telling stories about ourselves. Capturing these thoughts and impressions, while not necessarily valuable to the project itself, help me shape a more coherent narrative about my own projects, wishes and ideas.
The greater value for me, though, is in having a low friction place to write things down on the fly, without worrying first if they’re in the “proper place” or if they’re rubbish stuff I just need to write to get out of my mind and never come back to. By removing the need to judge and categorize it before writing, Daily notes made me more prone to register these thoughts.
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Good luck with that! Hope you can! 
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In my job I have several meetings a day (frequently 4 or 5). I used to take meeting notes in each project file, for example project X would have a section for meeting notes, project Y would also have a section for meeting notes, etc. I’ve turned this on it’s head and now, each daily note has a section for meeting notes. A link to the project goes into the daily note and bullet point notes for the meeting go into the daily note. I also have a section for the solo work that I did with basically a bullet list for each project note.
I find this much better for when I do my weekly review and planning. I review all the daily notes for the week, to see exactly which projects I had meetings about or did work on. The back links in Obsidian also allow me to see the various meetings I’ve had when I’m looking at a specific project note.
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Your workflow is very similar to mine. I sent a question via Slack to the Craft developers. I need to be able to link to a project “folder”, not just a note. I also tried this in Obsidian but, (and I may well be wrong, I don’t see a way to link to a folder in Obsidian) I have not found a way to do this in Craft. I can easily type [[ ]] to link to documents but my projects are folders with documents in those folders related to the projects.
What you are doing sounds ideal for the daily note, IF I can figure out how to link to a project folder.
UNLESS, there is a way to effectively create a “project document” instead and use subpages/cards. Hmmm…any Craft users using that approach?
Roam was the first knowledge management app I came across that foregrounded that daily note feature (not counting journalling apps). I always thought of it as a way to facilitate a layer of ”don’t have to think about it” organisation, more so than as a prompt for daily reflection. With a daily note, you don’t have to think about where a particular thought belongs at point of capture, instead you can just capture thoughts in your daily note and connect them to other notes/subjects as you go. In that way, the daily note is kind of like an inbox for each day, except unlike an inbox you don’t necessarily have to process your daily note and move things out of it…
That said, I’m not a Roam user, much as I’ve tried. And as I think about this further, it occurs to me that I do something like this in Drafts (which could itself be seen as one big inbox, although that’s not how I use it…): I manually fire up a daily note each morning and offload whatever occurs to me, while making liberal use of an action that makes it easy to split off anything that might be more useful as an independent thought/reference, with links back to the original daily note…
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I don’t know if this would work for you, but I use a document for each project in Craft instead of a folder. I use folders for areas of responsibility. This works well for me.
I think that may well work. I have such a habit of using folders as project containers that I need to retrain myself given the new capabilities KM apps like Obsidian and Craft. Thanks for the idea.
I’m going to give this a try. The nice thing about Craft is I can create sub-pages and sub-cards which would accomplish the same thing as using a folder structure plus I have the advantage of backlinking. Thanks again!
Yeah, looks like you can’t link to folders in Obsidian. I haven’t started organizing with folders yet. Just curious, do you follow a system for your folder organization?
Like you, I’ve always used folders for projects and I was doing that in Craft when I first started using it. For some reason I can’t remember, I discovered that documents work better as project “folders” in Craft. One thing I like is that I can star the most important projects, which separates them from the rest of the documents.
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It’s my “am working on” and “have done” list. I also use it as an inbox and for meeting notes.
Since I’m not a fan either of Obsidian or Craft, I replicated this in Drafts with shortcuts. Get extracted events and reminders for today. Since Shortcuts is coming to macOS, I’m now more interested to have multi-platform solution, which before was mostly possible only in Drafts.
I was, usually along project and division lines but I’m reconsidering. I may try to create documents with sub-pages/sub-cards in Craft and not use folders. This makes linking easier.
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@grs If you don’t mind my asking, can you give me an example of areas? I originally had a parent folder–WORK and sub-folders for each project. If I go with just using document for projects, I’m not sure what folders/areas? I’d use.
Interstitial journaling. In my opinion, the implementation of the Daily Notes Page in Roam Research (and Logseq for that matter) is one of its killer features. Nearly everything starts off on the DNP.
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I don’t mind at all. I use Craft for personal project management so some of my areas are: house, financial, health, personal, technology, travel. If you’re responsible for departments or divisions, those might be natural areas for you. Or whatever your projects are related to could be your areas. I’m pretty sure I started using areas of responsibility when I learned GTD, and I’ve always found it to be a useful method for categorizing projects. Anyway, I hope this helps.