Adaptable Daily Page with Multiple Triggers

A conditional daily checklist can be automated so weekend pages omit work-related tasks while weekdays include them—without manually editing templates. The setup hinges on a templater snippet that reads the daily note’s date title, determines whether that date falls on Saturday/Sunday, and then either includes or skips a “workday” section accordingly. The practical payoff is less weekend friction and fewer burnout-inducing reminders, because work to-dos simply never get inserted into Sunday (and Saturday) daily pages.

The workflow starts with periodic notes to generate consistent daily note titles in the format “YYYY-MM-DD.” That date string becomes the key input for templater. Instead of relying on a dedicated “open today’s notes” daily-note hotkey, the system uses periodic notes to open/create the daily note, ensuring the title always matches the expected pattern. A notes folder is also used as a trigger target: when an empty file is created in the periodic notes daily folder, templater fires a “new file” template to populate the page.

Because the daily note template needs to work both when notes are created automatically and when a user clicks an empty placeholder, the configuration uses two layers of templater triggering. First, a periodic-notes trigger creates an empty daily note in the correct folder and then runs the daily note template. Second, a “meta template picker” handles cases where a user wants to create a daily note by interacting with an empty note file—avoiding the need to remember extra hotkeys. The meta picker checks the file title length (10 characters, matching the YYYY-MM-DD structure) and validates that the title begins with a plausible year (e.g., 1990s or 2000s) so it only applies to daily notes.

Inside the daily note template, the snippet converts the date title into a moment.js date object using a format string aligned to the title structure (year, month, day with zero-padding). It then uses the weekday name to decide whether the day is a weekend: it inspects the first character of the weekday (character index 0), treating “S” as the weekend marker (Sunday/Saturday) and anything else as a weekday. If the day is not a weekend, the template prints the work-related section into the page; if it is a weekend, that section is skipped. The result is a single adaptable daily template that automatically inserts the right checklist content based on the date—keeping weekend pages clean while preserving full weekday planning.