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
- Templater folder location:
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
- Daily Note Template:
Calendar config
- Change following plugin settings:
- Show week number:
on
- Show week number:
See it in action
- If you don't have right sidebar open, then press
cmd+p
and selectToggle right sidebar
. - Press
cmd+p
and selectCalendar: 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
Top comments (1)
Wow I didn't knew it was possible to do templating or scripting like that in Obsidian! Very cool!