Structured daily/weekly notes - in Obsidian

Earlier this week I've been reading a brilliant post Writing Down What I Do — In Obsidian from Chris Krycho and somehow found myself in a rabbit hole trying to automate some aspects of this approach.

The why

When I'm building a system for myself, I need to make sure that I'm:

• Happy with the idea of how it will look like in the future
• Making it as little chore as possible for myself

Because of these I took the original concept and made it a little bit more "mine".

The how

The core of the functionality here is revolving around three community plugins: Templater, Periodic Notes (which itself requires Natural Language Dates), Calendar and Tasks.

Templater config

• First create a folder in your vault called /Templater.
• Then create file /Templater/Daily.md with following content:

---
date: <% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD", 0, tp.file.title, "YYYY-MM-DD") %>
week: <% tp.date.now("YYYY-[W]W", 0, tp.file.title, "YYYY-MM-DD") %>
year: <% tp.date.now("YYYY", 0, tp.file.title, "YYYY-MM-DD") %>
---

#### Work
- [ ] 💪

#### Meetings
- 🎙

#### Outcomes
1. 🦄

• Next create file /Templater/Weekly.md with following content:

---
week: <% tp.date.now("YYYY-[W]W", 0, tp.file.title, "YYYY-[W]W") %>
year: <% tp.date.now("YYYY", 0, tp.file.title, "YYYY-[W]W") %>
---

## Notes
- 🚂

## History

<%*
Array.from(Array(7).keys()).map((i) => {
  date = tp.date.weekday("YYYY-MM-DD", i, tp.file.title, "YYYY-[W]W");
  tR += `### ${date}\n`;
  tR += `![[Tracking/Daily/${date}#Outcomes]]\n\n`;
});
%>
## Outcomes
1. 🪂

• Change following plugin configurations:
  • Templater folder location: Templater
  • Trigger Templater on new file creation: on

Periodic notes config

• Create following two folders:
  • /Tracking/Daily
  • /Tracking/Weekly
• Change following plugin settings:
  • Daily Note Template: Templater/Daily.md
  • Daily Notes - Note Folder: Tracking/Daily
  • Weekly Note Template: Templater/Weekly.md
  • Daily Notes - Note Folder: Tracking/Weekly

Calendar config

• Change following plugin settings:
  • Show week number: on

See it in action

• If you don't have right sidebar open, then press cmd+p and select Toggle right sidebar.
• Press cmd+p and select Calendar: open view.
• In the top of the right panel a new calendar icon appeared. When you click it, you should see following:

Now when you click on individual days you should be asked if you want to create new note and if you confirm new note is created with expanded template placeholders:

And when you click on a week number again a new note will appear with the weekly template fields expanded. Note the "History" section which contains embeds of the outcomes of all daily notes in given week:

Conclusion

With a little bit of scripting/templating one can create a pretty automated system for organized note taking that provides block embedding of the relevant notes.

Photo by Raphael Wild on Unsplash