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A while ago, I shared my daily note template with you. In this article, I want to explain how I use my daily notes in practice.
Using daily notes as knowledge inbox
I've already published two articles about journaling, so I won't dive too deeply here. The key point is that journaling is at the very center of my Personal Knowledge Management system. While I use and heavily recommend (a down to earth version of) the Zettelkasten method, I actually don't create many fleeting notes. Instead, I capture whatever I find useful/inspiring as part of my daily notes.
As a result, my daily notes act as the inbox of my knowledge base. Anything I come across or think about that I decide to capture ends up in my daily notes. The benefit of this approach is that I can remain focused on whatever I'm doing. I don't waste time creating notes and links throughout the day. I don't have time for that. Instead, I defer the "knowledge extraction" to my weekly reviews.
What I call "knowledge extraction" is the process of creating and linking notes, based on the information stored in my daily notes. Once done, the processed daily notes only contain links to the newly created notes. I generally do this once a week, during my weekly review, extracting knowledge from one daily note at a time.
Once knowledge extraction is done, daily notes maintain the link between the moment when some idea entered my knowledge base and the idea itself. Thus they act as an ordered reference of what I added to my knowledge base. If I look back at a daily note from last year, I can easily recover the mental context I was in at the time and the things I've learned back then.
I'll take a concrete example to illustrate this process:
## Discovered today
- The greatest lie we tell ourselves: "I have time"
- Why solopreneurs are missing out when not taking/making notes (i.e., using PKM)
- Lose opportunities for personal and business development
- Not thinking ahead as well as they could be
- Taking notes helps a ton to organize your thoughts, be strategic about the future, be more realistic/grateful about the past, and focused on what needs to be done now/next
- What do to?
- Clearly document and articulate your goals, as well as a vision for your future and your company's (this year, next year, within 3/5/10 years)
- Take daily notes to track your progress
- Perform periodic reviews to look back and understand what went well/what didn't
- When we write something down (physically or digitally) we are converting a thought about the world from our brains into material which can be interacted with, both later by ourselves and by others — Nick Seitz
- Depending on how information is stored, linked, and utilized, we will get either more or less use out of that information. — Nick Seitz
- You have to earn complexity
- Related to [[Gall's Law]].
- Linking ideas together helps us remember and (re)use those
- Knowledge is emergent. It lies in the connections we make between ideas. That's why mental models are so useful to develop and acquire
- Take Small Bites Every Day
- It takes time to build good things
- The best thing you can do to get ahead in life is to realize you’re not special and to learn how to deal with all the uncertainty life throws at you. — [[Daniel Vassalo]]
Above is an extract from my current daily note. At the end of the week, when I review this note, I'll extract each element into separate notes, either improving existing ones, or creating brand-new ones. I'll also link to other relevant notes and tag the newly-created ones.
Usually, I start by extracting quotes. I often capture the ones that inspire me, and those are really easy to extract. In my knowledge base, I like linking each quote with its author. I create one note per quote, and one note per person. Let's process the following one:
The best thing you can do to get ahead in life is to realize you’re not special and to learn how to deal with all the uncertainty life throws at you. — [[Daniel Vassalo]]
As you can see, in this case I already have a link to the note of Daniel Vassalo in my knowledge base, meaning that I already have a note for that person. One less step for me. If I didn't have one, I would start by creating one.
I go ahead and create a note with the entire quote as the name (it doesn't always work, but often does). Once created, I hit ALT+E to invoke the templater plugin and insert the quote template that is part of the Obsidian Starter Kit. That template takes care of adding the relevant metadata, to which I add a few tags:
File: The best thing you can do to get ahead in life is to realize you’re not special and to learn how to deal with all the uncertainty life throws at you.md
---
tags:
- quotes
- life
- uncertainty
- personal_development
---
> The best thing you can do to get ahead in life is to realize you’re not special and to learn how to deal with all the uncertainty life throws at you
[[Daniel Vassalo]]
Once that note is created, I replace the quote in my daily note by a link pointing to it. I repeat that process for each of the points in my daily note.
Let's look at a more complex example:
- Why solopreneurs are missing out when not taking/making notes (i.e., using PKM)
- Lose opportunities for personal and business development
- Not thinking ahead as well as they could be
- Taking notes helps a ton to organize your thoughts, be strategic about the future, be more realistic/grateful about the past, and focused on what needs to be done now/next
- What do to?
- Clearly document and articulate your goals, as well as a vision for your future and your company's (this year, next year, within 3/5/10 years)
- Take daily notes to track your progress
- Perform periodic reviews to look back and understand what went well/what didn't
Here, I have captured some ideas about why solopreneurs are missing out when they're not taking/making notes and using PKM. These are ideas that I had in mind and want to further explore. Based on these, I actually want to branch out, prepare related content, and maybe initiate new projects. For now, I just want to avoid forgetting.
I start by creating a note called "Why solopreneurs are missing out when not taking or making notes and using PKM". Since a few more ideas pop up in my head, I capture those along with the previous ones. This time, I use the permanent note template of the Obsidian Starter Kit, as these are my own ideas:
File: Why solopreneurs are missing out when not taking or making notes and using PKM.md
---
tags:
- permanent_notes
- business
- solopreneurship
- pkm
- ideas
---
# Why solopreneurs are missing out when not taking or making notes and using PKM
- They miss opportunities for personal and business development
- They fail to think/plan ahead, while PKM would enable them to
- They don't have an external space to think in a structured way
- If they have excellent documentation skills, then they can be efficient on projects, but they fail to optimize their own trajectory
- ...
Simply said, they're missing out. Taking notes helps a ton to organize your thoughts, be strategic about the future, be more realistic/grateful about the past, and be focused on what needs to be done now/next.
The first challenge is for them to realize that there are [[Better ways]]. They could clearly document and articulate their goals, the vision they have for their future and their company's. They could [[think about milestones]] for the next 3/5/10 years. They could take daily notes and track their progress. They could regularly look back, identify issues and improve over time. They could more quickly realize when they are falling for the [[Sunk cost fallacy]].
Personal note: [ ] I could help raise awareness about this situation, communicate more about this
The second challenge is for them to get started with Personal Knowledge Management, note-taking, and note-making. Not only get started but efficiently so.
Personal note: [ ] I could communicate more around the relevance of the [Obsidian Starter Kit](https://obsidianstarterkit.com) for entrepreneurs.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
As you can see, I have expanded the initial bullet points into a fully fledged (but still atomic!) note. This one summarizes my trail of thought of the moment on this topic. The tags will help me resurface this note in different contexts. I've linked the note to a few other ones that discuss related topics (e.g., the sunk cost fallacy), which strengthens my knowledge base, and I've also added a few tasks. It's not something I do regularly, but in this case, since this might turn into a project at some point, I found it useful to keep track of the next steps I have in mind.
The last step is again to replace the initial bullets points in my daily note with a single link: [[Why solopreneurs are missing out when not taking or making notes and using PKM]].
Ultimately, after applying the same process to all the points in my daily note, it would end up like this:
## Discovered today
- [[The greatest lie we tell ourselves is "I have time"]]
- [[[Why solopreneurs are missing out when not taking or making notes and using PKM]]
- [[When we write something down (physically or digitally) we are converting a thought about the world from our brains into material which can be interacted with, both later by ourselves and by others]]
- [[Nick Seitz]]
- [[Depending on how information is stored, linked, and utilized, we will get either more or less use out of that information]]
- [[You have to earn complexity]]
- [[Linking ideas together helps us remember and (re)use those]]
- [[Knowledge is emergent]]
- [[Take small bites every day]]
- [[It takes time to build good things]]
- [[The best thing you can do to get ahead in life is to realize you’re not special and to learn how to deal with all the uncertainty life throws at you]]
At this point, the bulk of the knowledge extraction process is done, and my knowledge base contains a number of new connected ideas.
Taking time to extract knowledge from my daily notes in one go instead of little by little throughout the week helps me be more consistent (it's the century old factory analogy). Also, I've noticed that within a short time span (< 1 week), I tend to capture many related ideas. Processing those at the same time makes it easier for me to connect them together.
Another benefit of this process is that my daily notes then turn into "time anchors" for the knowledge I have extracted. I know when a given idea entered my knowledge base, and I can recover the mental context I was in (what I was working on, what concerned me, what challenges I was facing at the time, etc). This means I can look really look back.
Yet another is the cross-pollination of ideas. As I'm processing daily notes in batch, I create a mental context with many ideas floating in my mind. Those ideas help me enrich the notes by identifying similarities, analogies and discrepancies between seemingly unrelated ideas. It also works across fields. One minute I could be rambling about entrepreneurship, and the next I could be thinking deeply about the future of the tech industry, parenting or the intersection between those.
Last but not least, I get to further explore the ideas I've found interesting during the week, giving me the opportunity to either throw them away or improve them.
Going further
If you want to further explore Personal Knowledge Management, then take a look at starter kit for Obsidian. It will give you a solid starting point for your note-making efforts. I also offer coaching sessions.
I publish a weekly newsletter about PKM, note-taking, lifelong learning, and more!
Also check out my Personal Knowledge Management Library. It’s a huge collection of resources (articles, books, videos, YouTube channels, and a lot more).
If you find PKM interesting (I really hope you do!), then you might want to join our community.
Conclusion
In this article, I've explained how I process my daily notes, and the process I use to turn those into time anchors. I've described my knowledge extraction approach, as well as the benefits it brings me.
That's it for today! ✨
About Sébastien
Hello everyone! I'm Sébastien Dubois. I'm an author, founder, and CTO. I write books and articles about software development & IT, personal knowledge management, personal organization, and productivity. I also craft lovely digital products 🚀
If you've enjoyed this article and want to read more like this, then become a subscriber, check out my Obsidian Starter Kit, the PKM Library, my PKM coaching page, my collection of books about software development and the IT Concepts Wall 🔥.
You can follow me on Twitter 🐦
If you want to discuss, then don't hesitate to join the Personal Knowledge Management community or the Software Crafters community.
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