February 10, 2024 - Journaling in Obsidian

This year, I've started a habit, that I track in Daylio, to journal in my private Obsidian vault. The goal isn't to exhaustively write about my day, but rather jot down the most notable of moments that I want or may need to recall at a future date. For example:

• notable meetings/phone calls with friends or family I haven't connected with in awhile and major highlights about our conversation
• amusing interactions with members of my household that I might want to remember in the future
• Matters that I may be concerned about keeping a track record about, in case there is a developing pattern, such as a weird noise in the house, or if I'm developing a symptom of COVID
• Personal or Professional projects that I worked on and the progress I made.
• etc.

To facilitate this, I use the Daily Note Plugin which serves as my starting point for most Obsidian notes (see my Vault organization schema).

I don't yet have a defined habit of reviewing the journal entries, but I have found it useful when I am preparing for a phone call with someone and I want to review what we talked about last time we connected. I also anticipate reviewing the timeline specific projects as a 'retrospective' on what went well and what could have been done differently.

There is also some therapeutic value to writing out the day's events I have stronger feelings or anxiousness about. Naming and unpacking those feelings and the contributing factors helps me put the matter aside before the end of the day so I'm not ruminating on them while trying to fall asleep in bed.

A nice thing about using Obsidian for this practice, is of course the note linking, so that Proper Nouns are linked. This helps with recollection of adjacent topics. Obsidian is also available on both desktop and mobile, so I can journal in whatever context I'm currently working. In fact, most of this post was written and published from my phone - hence the typos and awkward grammar.

The header(list.journal entries) is linked to a file more as a tag. I don't actually write anything in that file, but I do have an Obsidian query that finds all the files that has the sections that have that heading tag and displays them in reverse Chronological order. This makes it easy to quickly review the previous period's journal entries.

Because this is a new practice for 2024, I still see it as an experiment, but it is one that I expect to continue for the foreseeable future.