Member-only story
PLAIN TEXT. PAPER, LESS · 152
Append, Not Prepend, if You Want to Craft a Dashboard at the Top of Your Daily Notes
Helpful friction keeps priorities in view
Everyone needs a place to write down both the big and little things that come up during the day. The medium (paper or digital) matters less than the ease with which notes can be recorded and recalled.
Today I’m writing about digital scratchpads, and the value of integrating a life dashboard where you’ll see it every single day. I’m coming from the perspective of keeping daily notes in One Big Text File, but the principles apply to any daily note practice.
It doesn’t matter if you prepend or append notes, unless…
Whether or not you use one file per day or one per year (as I do), you will have to choose whether notes made throughout the day go above or below the note before. Multiple notes in a single daily notes file can have a time stamp if you want to track the chronology of thoughts throughout the day.
Entries are always dated and optionally time stamped (in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM format, e.g. 2025–04–14 14:06, because we are civilised 😉) and may be added to the top or bottom of the document. (Okay, okay, I concede that the…
