Obsidian — Daily Notes as a Single File?

Daily notes are a powerful tool to capture everything coming to your mind throughout the day. Indeed, they allow you to gather everything in one place: tasks, thoughts, … But they are not always so practical.

Today we will see what problems daily notes suffer from when used across multiple files, and a possible implementation of a system to overcome these difficulties.

Problems of a Multiple Files Implementation

When I design systems, I usually like to separate these systems into the smallest possible parts to make them independent. For Obsidian, it’s the same thing. Using multiple daily notes instead of one is part of this philosophy.

On the other hand, there are drawbacks to this.

Difficult navigation: if you ever need a specific piece of information or several pieces of information, then you have to search in several files, which can make the navigation complicated.

Waste of time: creating each note individually can be time-consuming. Fortunately, with Obsidian, Templater is available to overcome this problem, and even with Templater, it can take time to create files.

Link noise: depending on how you use your daily notes, it can add a lot of links to the graph view. It’s not a problem for everyone, but if you want a clear graph view it’s better to use as fewer links as possible.

Below, you can see my graph view. All the nodes around the colored nodes at the center are daily notes, and they’re useless in this view.

Speed: Obsidian is more efficient when working with a single file than with many files.

Export: if you ever want to change software, this software will certainly understand a large file better than many small files. For example, if you want to switch to a classic markdown editor, it can be quite annoying to have to open 50 files to edit them all.

However, it would be lying to talk only about the problems of the multiple files daily notes. There is one big advantage to such an implementation: it allows you to query things easily.

For example, you can use Dataview with several files, but it won’t work with one file. Instead, you will have to use the native Obsidian search feature to query things.

Why Use a Single File?

Using a single file solves the problems I mentioned above. In fact, using a single file is even the most natural way to represent an index (because daily notes represent an index of your life) because it is hard to imagine an index spread over several files.

Also, depending on your needs, it may or may not be worthwhile to change to using only one file. For example, if you don’t need to use Dataview, then a single file implementation may make things easier.

How to Implement a One-Note System

The first thing you have to do to implement a one-note system is obviously to create a new note. You can name it as you want, let’s say “Daily Index” for example.

Then, you have to decide what you want to put in this file. Do you want to track the tasks you’ve done or what you have to do every day? Do you want to track your ideas? Do you want to track your habits?

Once you’ve decided what you want to track in your index, you can create a template. It will allow you to save time when you want to create new daily entries.

Also, you can establish conventions. It will make queries from your index easier. For example, if you want to log when you’ve read a book, you can write it “read {book_title} by {author}” and keep this convention every time. Another example: if you want to track the place you’re in when writing in your daily entry, you write it “@ City, Country”.

You can see below an example of a daily entry in an index file.

Now, the purpose is to add new entries to your index each day using your template. You can do it manually, but it’s better to use Templater or QuickAdd to save time.

For example, you can add a capture macro to automatically create the daily entry when you open your vault or when you hit a shortcut. You can also add capture macros to capture thoughts, tasks, or ideas easily.

Finally, over time, you will have a big index with headings for each day. So you know you can find easily all the information in one place. You can also collapse the headings if you want to make the note clearer.

Query

Once you’ve got some data in your index, you can query it. It’s can look a bit complex at the first glance, but it’s easy.

Imagine I have a lot of entries in my index, and I want to get to the date “2022–11–20” without scrolling. I can do it with this query:

file:Daily.md section:("## 2022-11-20")

Now if I want to know what I’ve done each day I was in Montréal:

file:Daily.md /^@ Montréal

If I want to find all the things I’ve read:

file:Daily.md /^- read

You can also use regexes to find things in your notes.

Doing these things is only possible because I established conventions, that’s why it’s important to do this.

Final Note

Is it better to use a multi-file implementation or a single-file implementation for your daily notes, that is the question. It may seem to make things more complex, but at the same time simpler.

In fact, as with everything with Obsidian, it’s best to do what works for you and test things out. So it’s up to you to see if this implementation can work for you!

Find all my Obsidian-related stuff here: Use Obsidian like a Pro

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