- [<] Status Log - created:: 2022-05-26 - current-status:: shipped. - [S] Marketing - purpose:: Premium article for the [[Obsidian Roundup]] - I [tweeted about it](https://twitter.com/EleanorKonik/status/1529806813394239489) lol I also [talked about it in Discord](https://discord.com/channels/686053708261228577/744933215063638183/979444679907115088). - [I] all about how I used to try to use a daily note because people talked about them being amazing, but didn’t like how I couldn’t do themed reviews (like a monthly resonance calendar). I made a plugin for this but it was just so much friction and frustration that I stopped. A lot of people like daily notes because they don’t have to think about where things go… but my system is organized in such a way — and my brain works in such a way — that it’s very easy for me to remember where things are supposed to go. In my house I have a saying, “everything has a place.” I don’t struggle to remember where my dishes go, so why would I struggle to remember where my health notes go? What I find difficult is when similar things wind up in different rooms; if there is a glass in every room, whether dirty or full, my system broke down somewhere along the way and I feel the same way about my notes. I literally wound up making a plugin to concatenate sections of my daily notes into one monthly file, but honestly, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that it took me a long time to stop treating daily notes as “fleeting notes” where I could “spin things out if I needed to” — because it turns out that I, personally, don’t usually take useless notes. I have spent months trying to get the information out of my old daily notes into somewhere I can find them _without_ serendipitously stumbling across them in my links… because I also do a lot of my navigation through folders, searches, links, and nodes on the graph. Anyway, it took me an embarrassingly long time to come up with the idea of log files, and I’m especially loving them because of how easy the QuickAdd plugin makes it to add things to those files without thinking about the date or ordering things. It’s been much more useful for dated information I actually want to track, like my health or my son’s, things I’m grateful for, and stuff I read and liked and want to keep… but don’t have time to write a whole reference note for. It’s also much more useful when you don’t have plugins like dataview to work with and are playing in your future-proofed vault in a plain text editor. - [I] "daily notes can be used to capture ideas that can't be immediately formed in its own note" is often a sentiment I hear expressed, but my question to myself, now that I have been taking notes in Obsidian for over a year, are there _really_ that many notes that can't be grouped with another note? The answer was no, not really. Almost everything in my old daily notes fell into a handful of categories. I've mentioned this before, but I came to Obsidian and the personal knowledge management world through the back door; I was looking for a way to manage my fantasy worldbuilding and fiction writing notes, not "build a second brain" or create a "life OS." I wound up here by accident, mostly by voraciously reading through a multitude of articles on best practices for knowledge management and organizing information. I read about resonance calendars, about daily notes practices, about capture/create workflows, and getting things done and atomic habits. It was all useful in one way or another, but the one thing that never clicked for me is the daily note. It's such a popular method that it's it's baked into the fundamental functionality of multiple notetaking apps that might otherwise be useful for me, and is even core to most analog methods like agenda books or bullet journals. It wasn't until I attended Leah Furguson's talk during the 2022 Linking Your Thinking Conference that I decided to give up on them for good.