Journaling

Posted on November 14, 2022 | #journaling #writing #obsidian

I started journaling and keeping notes in 2020. I think this is a must for anybody, especially knowledge workers. I write down how much time I spend on what in my daily note (my journal), followed by thoughts and ideas, how my health is doing, which of the things I want to do every day (habits) I actually did, and how much and what I trained that day. I use Obsidian for this and all my other notes. I chose Obsidian because it saves everything in markdown files, allows for linking, shows backlinks, has nice macOS and iOS apps, and syncing via iCloud is simple and works great so far!

My daily note template looks something like this:

# {{title}} - {{date: dddd}}

Year: [[{{date:YYYY}}]]
Place:
Yesterday:
Tomorrow:
Weight:

## Done Today


## Thoughts & Ideas


## Tracking
### Health
Healthy / Sick

### Habits
- [ ] Meditation
- [ ] Music
- [ ] Reading
- [ ] Programing / Creating
- [ ] Having done something today if I died tomorrow

### Training
0 minutes
0 KCAL

0 km jogging
0 km walking
... etc.

I have made a simple Apple Shortcut to paste in the dates for yesterday and tomorrow because I wanted to use as few community plugins as possible. You can download it here. Yesterday and tomorrow are in German, but that's an easy fix inside the Shortcut.

Keeping a daily journal helped me many times to remember what I did when and why. I also write down almost everything I learn and interlink it. Kind of like a digital garden¹. Which is what I am trying to do here in my blog. As I write down everything in markdown in Obsidian, it's easy to post to my blog which runs on Zola. Everybody should have a little space by themselves on the internet, as someone once wrote (I am sorry, I forgot who).

I only wish I would have started journaling earlier!