Besides my personal Obsidian vault, I’d always have a vault for each software project that I’m involved in. Having said that - my use of daily notes is twofold -

• During meetings/calls - I’d quickly jot action items, or a brief bullet list of important key take-aways
  • Especially in conjunction with the Tasks plugin - I can quickly create a new task for myself, or for a peer (using their name as a tag). This way the tasks stay with their relevant context - the daily note they were created on, but I can still create a note with a task query that would give me a compiled list for tasks owned by a specific person, that would allow me to follow-up on them later.
• As I work on programming tasks - I’d keep links, ideas, options gone-through-, or to-consider-

I’ve tried at various points to do dailies with different formats and such, but I’m apparently a boring person because I don’t have much to write about on a daily basis. I don’t like using Obsidian for really personal-ish stuff like journaling because it’s all plain-text and I haven’t bothered to encrypt everything. I do use it for taking notes or writing out notes on personal projects I’m working on or new concepts I come across or just general things I want to remember (things I wouldn’t care if somebody stumbled across it). Daily sort of “What did I do this day” notes are kind of weird to me, since nothing of note happens most days and I’m not anticipating being called into court to recount what happened.

I picked up one thing from Nick Milo’s Ideaverse starter vault (or Linking Your Thinking or whatever it’s called now), it’s the idea of “Efforts”. It’s essentially another way of saying “Projects”, but maybe less formal and encapsulates anything and everything I might be working on, dealing with, or putting effort into. If I have to write a paper, brainstorm something, car maintenance, an ongoing responsibility, something needs repaired, I have a dream project, or whatever, I create an effort note and tag it as either Hot, Ongoing, Simmering, or Sleeping, depending on what’s going on with it at the moment. Then I use Dataview tables to sort them on my home note.

I call what I’m doing “time journalling,” but that might not be the correct term. Every day I get a new note, I have a keyboard shortcut that puts in the time, and I write what I’m doing. I also have a template for meetings. I use a global shortcut to bring up this note no matter what desktop I’m in, so I always have a note taking surface an ‘F10’ away.

Next, I have “work tracking” notes. In my example below is “LRSF 2024”. So any time I’m working on that I just link to it from my daily note and for the most part, that note just exists so I can scroll through all the work I’ve done on that project using the “Linked mentions” section.

I also have some tags like “PersonalComputing” if it’s related to making something on my computer work, or another tag if it’s a fun/interesting story I might want to remember.

The overhead of this system feels a bit high, but, I have been sticking with it since December or so. I’d say it has been most useful for answering questions like “What happened this day?” I have been able to find things related to work by linking to work tracking notes, but, I’m not sure how that’s going to scale as time goes on.

Actually, a second thing I’m not sure about - I haven’t been very good about integrating information I want to keep accessible long-term in with my other notes. It used to be if I figured something out about ‘ibus’ (for example), I’d add it to some “Linux desktop” note. I’m more likely now to just let it live in my daily notes. On the one hand, I might be more likely to write things down because there isn’t the friction of going to find the right note and worrying about formatting. On the other hand, it seems likely this information will get harder to find if it all lives in date-titled notes.

Anyway, so that’s all my “work” vault. I do something similar for a “Journalling” vault, but I’m not as happy with that setup.

A late addition: I also like using check boxes for things I need to get back to - it’s super fast to do and lets me get back to it later. You can search for unchecked check boxes, so at my weekly review I have a saved search that shows me all the things I thought I should do. Then I either do them or move them to my to-do app. This way I know if there’s an unchecked check box in my “DailyLog” folder, it needs attention.

I use dailies, but not daily, as a general life journal. When I am stressed out about something I brain dump everything I’m feeling and thinking and it helps me a lot to process these things.

Sometimes I will have multiple dailies in one day, one a day for a few days, or like more recently nothing for months. It just depends on what I’ve got going on in my life.

Don’t feel compelled to make daily notes if it’s a chore, it’s a tool which can be used at whatever frequency serves you best.