Setting up daily notes in Obsidian
When I first opened Obsidian, I remember being instantly overwhelmed, not by the tool itself, but by the silence of an empty vault. A vault in Obsidian is basically a folder with a fancy name, but when it is empty, it feels like being handed a blank notebook with endless possibilities and zero guidance. The Daily Notes plugin was actually my way out of that paralysis. I enabled it by going into ‘Settings’ → ‘Core Plugins’ → flipping the toggle for Daily Notes. Suddenly the sidebar gained this simple icon that looked like a calendar page. Clicking it created a file labeled with today’s date.
The first time I clicked it, nothing happened for about three seconds, and I genuinely thought my install was broken. Then I noticed a fresh markdown file sitting inside a folder called Daily. Even that tiny bit of structure felt like a relief because it meant I didn’t have to guess where to start writing. I immediately typed in what I had actually done that morning: spilled coffee on my desk and spent ten minutes wiping down my keyboard. So my first “journal” entry looked more like a confession than productivity, but it worked 🙂
After that, I played around with the date format in the settings. I preferred YYYY-MM-DD instead of the default, since sorting was less confusing. The default setting dropped 01-05 vs 05-01 and my brain had no clue if that was May or January. Just being able to control the file naming pattern with a simple change to YYYY-MM-DD eliminated half of my confusion. It felt oddly powerful for something so small.
Building a structured daily routine file
Once I got the hang of creating daily notes, I realized they were just too blank. I wanted automatic sections so I wouldn’t be rewriting “Tasks” or “Notes” every morning. To fix this, I created a template. Obsidian has a core plugin for templates, and at first, I completely misconfigured it because I didn’t link it to a folder. My template file just sat inside Misc with zero effect. After yelling at my screen for ten minutes, I discovered the setting ‘Template Folder Location’—only when I set that to my Templates folder did daily notes start pulling it in.
What worked well for me was splitting the template like this:
“`
# Tasks
– [ ]
# Meetings
–
# Notes
“`
Every time I create a new daily note now, that structure auto populates. It saves me from the “what do I write today” blank stare. A funny hiccup I noticed though—when I tried using double brackets [[ ]] for linked notes inside the template, sometimes they auto created ghost files I didn’t want. Like once I wrote [[Morning Routine]] as just a placeholder and suddenly there was a new file called Morning Routine sitting in my vault. Annoying, but also kind of neat, because it pushed me to formalize things I repeatedly referenced.
Honestly, the first week of doing this felt awkward because my Tasks section quickly filled with unchecked boxes that guilt tripped me when I turned Obsidian on the next day. But by the second week, I started noticing patterns. The same two things kept rolling over: updating a Zapier workflow and cleaning my downloads folder. That awareness alone made the logging worth it.
Linking notes across different days
This was the first time Obsidian clicked for me. Daily Notes by themselves are just little silos, but as soon as I learned to link between them, the whole thing started working like a brain. For example, when troubleshooting my broken automation—my Slack messages kept sending twice even though I only had one trigger—I documented everything inside that day’s Daily Note. Then the next week when I ran into the same bug again, I just searched for “Slack double message” and immediately saw the old note.
Pretty quickly, I started creating a Page called [[Automation Bugs]] and linked every nasty thing that broke. This gave me a weird sense of security because I’d often forget the fix within a few days. Linking back meant I didn’t lose those half figured out solutions. Sometimes I even quoted myself: “Added filter step, still fired twice, gave up.” That kind of entry doesn’t sound useful, but it was unbelievably grounding when I encountered the same glitch months later.
One cool trick I discovered: typing [[2024-03-12]] or whatever date automatically links me back to the exact Daily Note for that day. I used this like breadcrumbs when a project spanned multiple mornings. It feels silly at first, but if you’re like me and constantly lose your place in long projects, those backlinks basically turn Obsidian into a time machine.
Tagging to make things searchable
I resisted tagging at first because it felt like more overhead, but the search without tags was chaotic. For example, searching “Zapier” brought up every mention of the word, including random notes like “zap my energy this morning.” Not helpful. Once I started adding #automation or #bugfix to entries, searching became way saner.
The funny part is that I didn’t set up a formal taxonomy at all. Some days I impulsively used #zaps, other days #zapier, sometimes even #brokenworkflow. At first, that inconsistency drove me nuts. But over time, I realized I could batch search multiple tags using Obsidian’s boolean search (like ‘#zaps OR #zapier’). So I just leaned into the mess.
There’s this weird relief in not forcing it to be perfect. On one particular day I just wrote:
“`
# Meeting Notes
Talked to Jack about API connection #zapier #whyisitbrokenagain
“`
That actually became useful because months later, searching #whyisitbrokenagain made me laugh and pointed me straight to the conversation where we figured out we needed to reconnect the authentication token.
Adding tasks that actually show up
If you just write – [ ] Task inside a Daily Note, it looks like a checklist, but Obsidian has no central place to show incomplete tasks by default. I didn’t realize how much this mattered until I had about ten dailies with unfinished stuff scattered everywhere. It was like my to do list had exploded across a timeline.
The fix was to install a community plugin called Tasks. I hesitated because community plugins felt like a rabbit hole, but this one was worth it. After enabling, you can type queries like:
“`
“`tasks
not done
“`
“`
That inserts a live view of every unchecked box across your vault. I put one of those queries in a note called Master Tasks, and suddenly I had a dashboard. The first time I opened it, though, I nearly panicked—it pulled like fifty forgotten action items I had scattered around. Some were tiny like “rearrange bookshelf,” others were bigger like “investigate why my Airtable zap stopped.” At least they were now in one place.
The emotional part is important though. Seeing a giant unfiltered wall of tasks can make you want to shut the laptop. I started using filters like ‘due before today’ or ‘tagged #critical’ so I wasn’t looking at everything all at once. That honestly saved me from hating the daily note process.
Reviewing past entries without getting lost
After a month of using daily notes, I noticed that skimming backward was harder than I expected. Flipping through by date felt tedious, and I was tempted to give up. What helped was setting up a weekly review note. On Sundays, I created a note called [[Weekly Review]] and inserted links to each daily entry from the previous seven days. Kind of like this:
– [[2024-03-04]]
– [[2024-03-05]]
– [[2024-03-06]]
At first it felt redundant, but soon I realized I actually enjoyed scrolling a single screen to see all my messy notes together. In one Sunday review, I caught that the same Zap had failed three mornings in a row, which I wouldn’t have noticed if I had only seen each day in isolation.
Sometimes I pasted in a count of completed vs uncompleted tasks for the week. It wasn’t precise math—more like “did I mostly get through these?” but that verbal gut check was motivating. If I saw “Tasks rolled over Mon Tue Wed,” that was a clue something bigger was stuck.
Templates for different kinds of days
Not all days follow the same pattern. Some mornings I just wanted a place to jot random thoughts, while other times I needed a rigid checklist of meetings. I finally realized I could create multiple templates and manually insert the one I needed. For example, I made one called ‘Meeting Heavy’ with sections for agenda, participants, and follow ups. Another template ‘Messy Thinking’ was just a brain dump canvas with headings like “What’s on my mind” and “Half baked ideas.”
I messed this up at first because I thought the Daily Notes plugin could auto switch based on day of week, but that is not how it works. You have to open the command palette, search ‘Insert template,’ and pick the whichever one you want. Still, even that extra click was worth it because it made Monday mornings less overwhelming.
A hiccup to note: If you forget to add a new line between sections in your template, the headings will smash together and look hideous. I learned that the hard way after saving a whole week of raws that looked like “# Meetings# Notes# Tasks” glued together. Fixing them involved editing each one manually, which was annoying but memorable.
Keeping the habit long enough to matter
I’ll be honest—keeping daily notes requires a weird mix of stubbornness and forgiveness. Some days my entry was a single bullet saying “did not do anything useful.” Other days it turned into two pages of rants about why none of my automations behave consistently. The point is, the habit only started paying off after I had a decent stack of notes to connect.
I’ve had people ask, isn’t this just duplicating what a task manager already does? In some ways, yes. But Obsidian is different because it lets your throwaway details—like “Slack sent same message twice this morning”—live right next to your tasks. That context turns out to be the difference between staring at a lifeless to do list versus revisiting an actual day of work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A final note—don’t overthink the perfect system. I wasted so much energy tweaking YAML front matter, folder hierarchies, and tag dictionaries. What kept me actually writing was leaving those half broken and just opening today’s note anyway.