Journal

There was a Black Friday sale on Day One last November so I pulled the trigger and thought I’d give daily journaling a go. I’ve been dabbling with journaling for a while and have even used daily notes in Obsidian periodically. But the habit never stuck. I also had this weird thing where I was tracking some basic info like workouts and the day’s highlights in a paper-based notebook. Anyway, I was hoping to start a new habit that would help me both clear my head in the morning and perhaps even get a little better at writing. Plus, I figured I might be able to use it to track the things I was with my paper-based journal so I could get rid of that.

I used Day One for a month and overall liked it. It got me in the habit of writing each morning, even if it was mostly just a messy stream-of-consciousness. But I kept having this nagging thought: I didn’t want to spend time and effort putting my data in an app I didn’t really control. I wrote a little about this kind of lock in before when I was just starting to use Obsidian. I knew Day One wasn’t as open as Obsidian, but was hopeful it’s export options would work for me and the potential for data lock-in would be offset by the slick UI. However, I quickly found the Markdown export doesn’t really work, at least when it comes to exporting an entry’s media. I talked to support about it and they said they had to remove the feature that linked pictures, videos, and audio to an entry because it was buggy. So while you can export your entries in Markdown, you effectively lose any pictures, videos, or audio clips in those entries.

All this got me thinking more and more about what Steph Ango calls “file over app” and I realized I needed to make Obsidian work for my journaling since not only does it store data as simple text files, it’s also where I keep all my other notes/information.

The main problem I was having with Obsidian’s daily note feature, though, is it names the notes after the date they are created (e.g., “2024-01-02”) and doesn’t really provide any other means of identifying them. So if you look at the folder containing your daily notes all you see are a bunch of dates – you have no idea what happened on a particular day without opening the file and reading it.

The thing I really like about Day One is that you’re able to easily see your journal entries and quickly revisit them if something catches your eye. As mentioned, Obsidian’s daily notes are the opposite and quickly turn into a long list of indistinguishable file names that make revisiting them cumbersome at best. I needed to find a better way of handling this and think I have using Dataview.

In short Dataview allows you to query standard, text-based notes much like you can a database. You can create a query based on tags, file names, folders, or other pieces of metadata and it will create links to matching files dynamically. I was able to use Dataview to create a dashboard of sorts for my daily journal. I can display links to all my entries and show the date, the title, the workout I did that day, my weight, what we watched at night, or any other data I’m tracking. Of course, since all of this is in Obsidian I can also link journal entries to other related notes and keep all of my writing in a single app. And, as mentioned, all of these notes are simple text files that live on my local hard drive (and iCloud).