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Everyone needs a place to write down both the big and little things that come up during the day. The medium (paper or digital) matters less than the ease with which notes can be recorded and recalled.
Today I’m writing about digital scratchpads, and the value of integrating a life dashboard where you’ll see it every single day. I’m coming from the perspective of keeping daily notes in One Big Text File, but the principles apply to any daily note practice.
Whether or not you use one file per day or one per year (as I do), you will have to choose whether notes made throughout the day go above or below the note before. Multiple notes in a single daily notes file can have a time stamp if you want to track the chronology of thoughts throughout the day.
Entries are always dated and optionally time stamped (in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM format, e.g. 2025-04-14 14:06, because we are civilised 😉) and may be added to the top or bottom of the document. (Okay, okay, I concede that the format of date and time stamps within a document that’s appropriately dated don’t really matter.) Either approach—appending or prepending—is fine as long as you’re consistent.
I’m a little jealous of the way Roy Lowrance (a PTPL reader) prepends text to his OBTF:
I start each day with a to-do list for the day. It goes at the top of the file.
Notes written that day are just behind the to-do list.
If a new note closely relates to an existing note written today, I write the new note after the existing note. Otherwise, I write the new note after the to-do list.
My one-big-text-file is a file in Obsidian.
—Roy Lowrance
After reading that, my fingers itched to do the same! The approach has an elegant simplicity I admire. If there was a way to auto re-order entries I’d likely switch from top down to bottom up multiple times a month just for the variety (FYI there kind of is a way to do this; see below).
Jeff Huang, Karpathy and others add notes to the bottom of their OBTF, and so do I. It’s not the “right” way to do it, but it does have advantages. Appending adds the useful friction of seeing the top of the file first every time you open the file, something you can leverage into a dashboard for focus items.
The ⌘↓ and ⌘↑ keyboard shortcuts quickly take you from the beginning to the end of the text in most Mac apps. This allows easy access to the chosen focus points and the business end of your notes.
It’s my firm opinion that everyone needs a dashboard in one form or another. My dashboard is a master plan of what’s on my plate laid out in an easily digestible and accessible format. Add anything you need to access more than once a week. The Hookmark utility can help you generate links to files anywhere on your Mac. You can use basic Hookmark features for free. It’s also available on Setapp — highly recommended — for a 30-day free trial (use the code ELLANE).
The dashboard at the top of my OBTF is nothing more than a Markdown formatted list of things I want to see daily:
If your daily notes are in an OBTF, your dashboard will sit at the top of the file, greeting you every time you open it. Should you create a new file per day for daily notes, I recommend placing a link to wherever your dashboard lives at the top of your daily notes template.
Apps like Obsidian or iA Writer can transclude (embed) your dashboard at the top of your notes.
One of the comments on Matthew Cornell’s article on big text files talks about using a spreadsheet for taking notes. “Each item, thought, next action, waiting, general reference, etc is entered on one line,” says Tom.
Spreadsheets are free, sortable, exportable, and available on any device. They’re not plain text, but that would be a mere export away.
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