My Obsidian Daily Note Template

How I use Obsidian to track my day-to-day.

My Obsidian Daily Note Template
My Daily Note

I’ve spent the last few weeks using Obsidian as my daily note-taking app. With the addition of a mobile app this month, I am now all in on Obsidian. My work notes have centered around my daily notes. They are the home base of each day, and from there, I link out to other notes. In addition, I have some dynamic sections showing past due tasks from previous days and what’s due today. By doing this, I will quickly build out a library of thoughts, documentation, and historical data for my work.

Tasks, both over due and due today.
Tasks I check daily dynamically generated from the tasks plugin

So what are daily notes?

Daily Notes are single markdown files created each day. In settings, you can configure the file name utilizing the date in some way, specify a location, add a template using the Core Templates plugin, or the Templater community plugin, which I use.

Daily Notes Settings
Daily Notes Settings

Each day, I create a new note to start the day. I click the daily note icon in the left toolbar, and it creates the note. If the file already exists, it opens it. I even have a button on my Stream Deck set to open the daily note that I use constantly.

Update

When I open a daily note for the first time, I skim down to my Daily Checklist/Start of Day checklist. There, I have a quick list of tasks that I do each morning.

Daily Check List
Daily Checklist — Start of Day

Then, I typically log my first meeting and check any tasks that are due today. For the rest of the day, I add notes as needed, track all communications, meetings, do some time tracking, and take notes. As I need to, I break out into other notes if the information requires more details.

Meeting Log and Daily Work Log with inline tasks
Meeting Log and Daily Work Log with inline tasks

When I wrap up my day, I go to my Daily Checklist/End of Day tasks, reminding me to remove any headings from today’s note I didn’t use and any other tasks I want to end my day with daily.

Daily Check List — End of Day

With proper linking and tagging, I can use the Dataview plugin and Obsidian Tasks plugin to make dashboards and track specific tasks, including conversation topics.

How I Use Obsidian to Track Topics for my One-On-One Meetings
I’ve been using Obsidian for a little while now as my daily note-taking app. Over the years, I have used everything…

Download Template Text

Here’s a gist with the full markdown of my current Daily Note Template. (using Templater plugin)
https://gist.github.com/bennewton999/62b4a034445a24532591bc4c55a52cf5

This template is a work in progress, and I will follow up soon with updates. I expect there will be plenty.

Some ideas I will explore:

  • automating time tracking
  • importing calendar events
  • shortcuts to add reoccurring entries

Obsidian is the best note-taking app I have used — and I have used plenty. Better than my most recent tool, Apple Notes. It is fast and straightforward. The plugins and community remind me of VSCode, and look what that has done to developer productivity. I expect this tool to evolve as more plugins are released and people find new ways to utilize Obsidian.

UPDATE — How I automate creation of my daily note with iOS shortcuts.

Automating My Obsidian Daily Note
How I use iOS Shortcuts to automatically create and populate my daily note.

UPDATE — I now import my meetings.

How I Import My Meetings into My Obsidian Daily Note
How I automate importing my Obsidian daily note’s meeting schedule from my Outlook Calendar.