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:
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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!);
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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.