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[!summary]Eleanor Konik argues that themed logs are more beneficial than daily notes because they allow for better organization and easier retrieval of information. She found that daily notes often lacked context and became overwhelming, while themed logs keep related information together. Although daily notes may work for some, she prefers the clarity and efficiency of categorizing her notes by purpose.
Highlights
id990030609
Daily Notes are titled by date It seems obvious, but this was actually a pretty big problem for me. When I search for things in Obsidian (or outside of it…), the most prominent part of the result is the file name. When I’m browsing through links or folders or tags, I see file names. My graph displays file names. This is why I’m so careful about naming conventions, and as much as I love using headings to delineate between sections of notes, it wasn’t enough.
No habĂa pensado explĂcitamente en esto, pero sufro del mismo problema.
id990030691
Many people talk about their daily notes being a convenient place to jot down quick meeting notes, then tag them for easier retrieval, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I would rather just … put all of those notes into a meeting log, or a medicine log, or a garden log. Dated, still, but … logged.
id990030738
I don’t struggle to remember where my dishes go, so why would I struggle to remember where my health notes go? I know where my pens go, where my tape is, and where I’ve put my vitamins. I know that my meeting prep notes go in my work Notion, and my daughter’s medicine log goes in my family Notion, and my story ideas go in a particular folder Obsidian. This isn’t a thing that causes friction for me, not like having to click through a bunch of numerically named files to find the information I’m looking for is. Not like having everything obfuscated behind numbers and bullets and links is.
id990031398
I have hundreds of days worth of notes about illnesses and articles and exercise and gratitude and film. The point of the daily note is to put those things into the context of what else was going on that day, but that context is not usually important for me. There’s little insight to be had from the fact that I read a particularly article on the same day I had a bit of a morning cough or picked some strawberries. For me, the value is cross-day. It’s knowing that I had a streak of exercising that lasted three weeks before I got sick. It’s knowing that my strawberries ripened a month before the blueberries. It’s seeing a collection of disjointed articles in one place so I can look for patterns. That’s the whole reason I wrote my concatenation plugin, you know?
id990031997
The best part of the log files, though, is that it makes information easier to re-access later not just for me, but when dealing with other people. If I’m at the doctor, and they want to know the last time I was sick, or how often I’ve felt fatigued, I can just check the log instead of sifting through multiple notes. My son’s grandmother doesn’t care that my kid peed himself the same day that I researched the prevalence of rabies in American bats — she wants to know how many days it’s been since the last accident, to have a better sense of how potty training is going. My husband doesn’t care that we watched Altered Carbon the same day I took a nap, he just wants to know whether we should watch it or Burn Notice tonight.