Intentional daily journaling

I have kept a digital journal for a long time, starting with Momento on my iPhone way back in the day, and then switching to DayOne about 14 years ago. For 14 years, I used DayOne fairly frequently as a place to jot down thoughts, achievements, occurrences in my life, and reflections.

However, I made the decision this year to move my journaling from DayOne to Obsidian, mostly as an effort to achieve greater portability, reduce friction, and eliminate another app subscription. I was mostly grateful that I was able to migrate all my entries mostly seamlessly from DayOne to Obsidian.

As part of this effort, I have also changed how I journal, making it my journaling more intentional.

The Daily Note. Obsidian's daily note feature is the foundation for my journaling. Every day gets an daily note, title formatted as ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DD format. This formatting of the note titles is critical, as it is what allows for the creation of different shortcuts. I use the same date format in the titles of meeting notes (e.g., “Meeting with Bob YYYY-MM-DD”). This makes it easy to add meeting notes to my daily notes.

I love Obsidian's daily note plugin because it allows me to create daily notes in advance, which I often do as a way to plan out coming days. All daily notes are stored in a folder called "Journal." The only subfolder is one for attachments. Having been through a few exports and imports of Markdown files over the years, I have found this to be the best way to handle things.

Each daily note is created via a template using the following format:

Every morning I manually run a shortcut that copies to my clipboard information on the weather, location, and a daily quote. While I could automate this process, there is something about doing it manually that I enjoy.

The "Today" section of my note is a place for general things for the day - links to other notes for that day and a quick list of work accomplishments. It is mostly a quick reference section.

The "Journal" section is where I make time-stamped journal entries. I keep this section at the end of my daily note so that I can make quick journal entries using another shortcut, one that I can activate via my iPhone's action button to quickly inout text.

Finally another shortcut I use is one that grabs my current location as an Apple Maps link. I am still playing around with how to use it, but I like having location links added to my journal entries.

The part of this setup that I love the most is the Notebook Navigator plugin, which displays images from daily journal entries within the calendar widget. Because I am in Obsidian most of the day, I find that this motivates me to make entries more frequently.