In January 2024, I was trying to figure out what to do with weekly, monthly, and perhaps annual Obsidian review notes. I was fortunate to find Bryan Jenks' My Fully Automated Daily Note Review System In Obsidian Youtube video. That video provided some great foundational ideas.

I thought about what Bryan was doing with automated review notes and eventually came to a couple of conclusions. First, I decided that my daily notes were, in effect, going to be the single source of truth in terms of my journal information. In short, the daily notes would be the only place where journal-based information would be recorded and edited as necessary. Second, weekly, monthly, and annual notes (if implemented) would be automated rollup accumulations of daily notes with no unique data.

Once the overall design and structure of the notes were implemented, the accumulations were fairly straightforward. The Journal/Notes section of each daily note could contain entries prefaced with any of the following inline YAML tags:

::journal - Journal entries
::accomplishment - Accomplishments
::highlght - Highlights
::link - Links
::shared - Shared Expenses
::gratitude - Gratitude

Those inline YAML tags would then populate the weekly/monthly/annual note sections via dataview queries.

While I won’t share the majority of the data produced in my September 2024 note, I have expanded the Highlight section, and the entries listed there were pulled in from the listed Daily Notes.

This entire setup allows me to focus on entering and maintaining quality data on the daily notes while being able to review that data (sometimes) in the appropriate weekly and (mostly) monthly notes.