I always use the Logseq daily note because I can query things easily, and by this point it’s habit.
I don’t have a structure to how I make my daily notes at all, which is honestly the beauty of them, but most of the time it follows these broad questions:
- what am I thinking?
- how am I feeling?
- what am I doing? e.g. uni reading, activities, social events etc.
Some thoughts are super private, reflections on my past, feelings, anxieties. Other times, it’s rather dull…
At the beginning, I thought the daily note was supposed to be a commentary on how I was using Logseq, and sometimes it was, but it really is a place just to think and to refer back to. What meetings did I go to today? Which journal articles did I read? How was I feeling?
I really recommend this practice, and Logseq makes this super easy. Frictionless even. Just open the app and write
Taking it further
To take this practice further, I recommend working queries into your system so you can review your previous days. This is a useful practice but can also be very wholesome!
Every day I check what I was doing a year ago by changing my daily note template following Ramses’ article and Dario’s throwback query.
This means that every day I get to review what I was doing a year ago, and it’s great. I want present me to know what was happening to past me. I want to comment on that, I want to know how I feel about that past event now. I want to see how my thoughts, likes and dislikes have grown.
This can be a really wholesome activity. For example, today when I opened my daily note, I saw this:
I saw this whilst sat in the flat I put an offer in, as the 3rd March 2022’s entry will tell me that offer was accepted, and the 1st of June’s entry will tell me I moved in. This morning, I had such a lovely moment of gratitude and happiness and that was facilitated by my daily note practice and my Logseq query.
“Essence” of the every day
Beyond the wholesomeness above, the journal entry refers to Location Location Location, a classic British TV property show I grew up watching, so it gives a bit of cultural context too. I love these snapshots and that’s only after 1 year. Imagine the richness of 5 years of entries.
I call this sort of insight the “essence” of the everyday, and championing it became my life philosophy after reading Les Années/The Years by Annie Ernaux, which is her autobiography. She has a very original style throughout whereby she weaves her life story amongst detailed insights into French life from the 1940s-2008. A lifetime of memories and experience was communicated through 300 wonderful and engaging pages, and I decided I needed to gift some level of this insight to my future self. Digital tools like Logseq make it so much easier.
I really recommend beginning your daily note practice if you haven’t already. You can do this in Logseq, Obsidian, Capacities and more. I even built a daily note database in Notion to track things which I will write about one day.
All you need is a date property and a space to write. Your future self will thank you.
Are you a daily note user? How do you use them? Leave a comment to inspire!
