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Daily notes in separate files, or one big text file? Steph Ango has a way of turning the world (my world, at least) upside down with the simplest of ideas. I’ve said it before—the man is a quiet genius.
This week Steph referred to an article he’s written about how he writes and organised his daily notes. Using Obsidian’s unique note hotkey (see below) he writes one thought per file, rather than writing all the thoughts of the day into a single daily note. One day could potentially have hundreds of notes, differentiated from each other by a time stamp.
I love the way Steph randomly reviews notes and makes connections, and how notes naturally “bubble into bigger themes”, or become dormant for a time or even extinct.
As I read his post I was so taken by the idea that I considered throwing in the towel on my One Big Text File (OBTF), and diving back into daily notes! But I’m trying to follow the adage “Make haste slowly”, to make sure I keep the baby rather than the bathwater, an effort for me, who has been known to do the opposite.
Keeping daily notes in an OBTF was an answer to the feeling that I had too many files, and that potentially important things were easy to lose track of. One place to dump all thoughts, with the opportunity to revisit them and pull out salient points into their own space. I loved it! And still do.
But here’s the thing: I rarely review these notes and I’m not sure why.
It’s comforting to know they are there and that I can revisit them, but they aren’t linkable out of the box. I’d have to make time to refactor them into their own spaces, and for some reason I’m just not doing that. Maybe
The way Steph makes his notes feels more useable. And there’s more potential or them to evolve into something truly useful.
Who’d have thought this would be such an existential conundrum?!
In many ways Steph’s system is, or could be, the same as mine. In practice, however, there are significant differences. The ability to display a random note and to link to other notes without first having to extract them into an agile format is not something easily done in an OBTF.
I really am conflicted about this OBTF vs multiple notes idea so there’s only one thing to do: use both! There’s no reason for it to be an either-or scenario. Stay tuned for the outcome.
You may like to read Steph’s intentionally chaotic and lazy approach to note making in Obsidian, which can be applied to any app that allows linking between notes.
This more-detailed-than-you’d-expect procedure for creating uniquely named notes in Obsidian is here for the benefit of people new to the software as well as for people like me, who have where-are-my-sunglasses-oh-they’re-on-my-head moments.
⌘,) and click on Core pluginsUnique note creatorUnique note creator plugin and choose a date formatHotkeysUnique note creator and press the + to create a new hotkeyI kid you not, I had looked at the list of core plugins active in the initial Settings screen, searched in Community plugins, looked it up online, did everything but the thing I need to do to get to where I wanted to be!
Big thanks to everyone on Mastodon who solved the problem without making me feel like I’d asked a stupid question. <3
FYI I chose ⌘N for my hotkey (re-mapping existing conflicting hotkeys), and yyyy-MM-DD HHmm for the date format. 12-digit unique identifiers (UIDs) are 3 characters shorter, but I prefer having date/time combinations broken up so they’re easier to read at a glance.
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