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The most important thing about daily notes isn’t that they’re daily, or where you keep them. It’s that you write what you write at the best time and in the best place—for you—to write it.
On the cusp of entering my second year keeping daily notes in One Big Text File (OBTF), I’m even happier with it now than I was a year ago.
It started as an experiment. An experiment that surprised me, because I’d just perfected a great system of daily notes into weekly into monthly that I’d been working on for, quite literally, years!
Scott Kingery is another person I’ve seen make the move away from using a separate file for each day’s notes. In his case it’s because he feels it was overkill. These days Scott prepends each day’s interstitial journaling notes to the top of his #OBTF, because the simplicity of this approach works better for his brain.
As much as simplicity and minimalism are buzz words, I’ve noticed that articles on the intricacies of embedding daily notes into weekly or monthly summaries get more attention than those on why this is often unnecessarily complicating. Granted, it seems to be a helpful practice for people with different needs to my own.
Anything beyond a simple list (in one file, or one for each day) should grow out of increasing needs, not increasing desire to do the thing just because the thing can be done.
Do I recommend keeping daily notes? Absolutely! Everyone should do it, in whatever form works for them.
Do I recommend that everyone keep their daily notes in an OBTF? Nope, but if the idea has you intrigued it might be worth a go.
Other things I’ve written about the OBTF:
You may like to keep an eye out for Scott’s next OBTF piece on how he’s linking it to other notes.
Can Obsidian Publish work for a blog? Yes and no. Vlad Campos is happy with his move to Publish but I’m finding it a struggle to see how I’d be better off with it.
My blog currently meets the world via Blot, which makes it easier to do some things and harder to do others. I’m exploring which of those things holds the most weight. No transclusion in Blot is a sad, sad thing! My lack of dev skills means making compromises in how information is displayed and referenced.
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