PLAIN TEXT. PAPER, LESS · 138

Daily Notes Don’t Need to Live in Separate Files

And they don’t need to be daily, either

Image by the Author

Sporadic Daily Notes Are Fine, Too

The most important thing about daily notes isn’t that they’re daily, or where you keep them. It’s that you write what you write at the best time and in the best place – for you – to write it.

On the cusp of entering my second year keeping daily notes in One Big Text File (OBTF), I’m even happier with it now than I was a year ago.

It started as an experiment. An experiment that surprised me, because I’d just perfected a great system of daily notes into weekly into monthly that I’d been working on for, quite literally, years!

Scott Kingery is another person I’ve seen make the move away from using a separate file for each day’s notes. In his case it’s because he feels it was overkill. These days Scott prepends each day’s interstitial journaling notes to the top of his OBTF, because the simplicity of this approach works better for his brain.

Don’t Overfill Your Needs

As much as simplicity and minimalism are buzz words, I’ve noticed that articles on the intricacies of embedding daily notes into weekly or…