Keep a Record of your Life in Obsidian
Recently, I reworked a bit my Obsidian setup. I found a new way to log things which I find very practical, so I’m going to share it with you today.
Prerequisite
Before implementing anything in Obsidian, the first thing you should ask is “Do I need it?”.
For me, I only add things when I need them, and when I don’t need them anymore I just remove them.
You should not just read my article and implement what I will talk about directly. You should first ask yourself how it can be useful for you to decide if you need it instead of overcomplicating your setup for nothing.
Hubs
The first thing to do to keep track of data is to add hubs. A hub is a note that allows you to have in one place an overview of data from several notes.
For example, I have 5 hubs in my Obsidian vault. One for my daily notes, one for the things I’ve discovered and don’t want to forget, one for my life events, one for the media, and one for my piano practice sessions.
So the first thing you have to do is to define the hubs you want and give them a purpose. For example, my life events and daily notes hubs allow me to have a retrospective view of my life, my piano session hub allows me to keep track of my progress, etc…
Once you have defined the hubs you need, you have to decide on an implementation to display data. For this, I like the plugin Dataview. There is also Database Folder.
Then, you can create your hub notes, and we’ll fill them with queries later.
Where to Store Data?
Depending on the way you decided to implement your hubs, you have several options.
I will talk about the Dataview way. Dataview is powerful to query data from several files, so we need to spread the data. An easy way to do this is with daily notes, and by doing this we’ll also keep track of the date the data was created.
So, depending on your hubs, you can create several Dataview fields and use them in your daily notes. You can create several fields for one hub. For example, for the Media Hub, I have the fields “ReadingLog” to keep track of what I read, “VideoLog”, and “ListeningLog”.
To make things more organized, I’ve added several headings in my daily notes:
The piano log is a bit special. I’ll explain why now.
You can create several types of daily notes. For example, I’ve moved all the piano session data to their own daily notes type because there is too much information and I don’t want to overcomplicate my daily notes.
You can then reference and embed your notes between each other using the syntax of the Obsidian links: ![Filename#heading^section]. For example, to reference my piano log in my daily notes, I write this: [[2022–12–21 Piano Session#⨮ LOG]]
This way, it looks like this in my daily notes when the piano session note is filled:
If you use several types of daily notes, be sure to keep things organized else it will quickly become messy.
Query Data
The last thing to do is to query data. Open your hub notes, and add your Dataview queries. If you don’t know how to write queries, I’ve made an article about Dataview here.
I’ll still give you some examples:
Get the last 7 daily notes titles and summaries in a table format:
```dataview
TABLE WITHOUT ID link(file.link, " ") + "<strong>" + Title + "</strong><br>" + Summary + "<br>" + file.link AS Entries
FROM "600 Periodic/610 Daily"
WHERE file.name != "610 Daily"
SORT file.name desc
LIMIT 7
```Get all the life events:
```dataview
table LifeEvent as "Log"
from "600 Periodic/610 Daily"
where contains(LifeEvent, "")
sort file.name desc
```Get all the piano sessions:
```dataview
TABLE PianoLog as "Log"
FROM "500 Personal/510 Music Log/511 Piano/5111 Daily"
SORT file.name DESC
where contains(PianoLog, "")
```Putting it All Together
Now, you probably have some beautiful hub notes! I’ve not shown how mine look like, so here’s a picture:
As you can see, all data are associated with their date, allowing me to have a retrospective view of my life by knowing what I’ve done each day.
You’ll also notice there is a cute navbar in my note. It’s very easy to do with the Obsidian links system.
Final Note
I’ll repeat myself, but only implement what you really need. Some days ago, I had other hubs, but I didn’t need them and I forgot to record the data every day. So I’ve just deleted them.
You should do the same. Don’t force yourself to stick to a system, because if you don’t need it, it will be a pain to stick to it.
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