Obsidian Basics: Daily Notes

Daily Notes in Obsidian is positioned as the fastest on-ramp to building a structured personal knowledge base—because it automatically generates dated notes and can pre-fill them with templates and workflow fields. The setup starts with enabling the Daily Notes plugin, then tuning how Obsidian names each day’s note, where it stores those notes, and what content gets inserted when a new daily note is created.

After switching on the Daily Notes plugin in Settings → Plugins, the key customization is the “date format,” which controls the title of each daily note. Obsidian supports a wide range of formatting tokens, including month, quarter, day-of-month, day-of-year, day-of-week, and time-related components like hours, minutes, seconds, fractional seconds, and time zones. The transcript emphasizes that the syntax is case-sensitive—for example, “M” vs “m” can change meaning—so careful token selection matters. A worked example builds a title like “25th June 2020 AD” by combining year, month, and day tokens, then verifying the result by opening “Open today’s note,” which immediately reflects the chosen format.

Next comes “new file location,” which lets users route all daily notes into a specific subfolder (e.g., a “journal” folder). If the folder name doesn’t exist yet, Obsidian throws an error (“failed to create daily note folder… was not found”). The fix is straightforward: create the folder with the exact name specified in Daily Notes settings, then open today’s note again to confirm the note is created inside that folder.

The third major setting is “template file location,” which determines what content gets cloned into each new daily note. The transcript highlights a limitation: templates are static in their current form. When a template is set, Obsidian clones the template into a new daily note, but edits made inside the daily note don’t alter the template file. Conversely, changes to the template file will propagate to future daily notes because each new note is cloned from the template at creation time.

A simple static template example includes sections like gratitude prompts (“what I am grateful for” / “what could make today great”), showing how the same structure repeats across days. The transcript then contrasts this with a more dynamic workflow the creator prefers: instead of relying on the built-in static template behavior, they use a “day template” that auto-generates yesterday/tomorrow dates via a script (mentioned as using Keyboard Maestro on macOS). The dynamic template also supports navigation between related notes (e.g., jumping from today to yesterday) and includes fields for daily planning and tracking.

Finally, the daily notes structure described includes practical sections such as an “inbox,” “notes,” “week plan,” sleep and work hours, and an “exploration” area for storing links or references encountered online. The overall takeaway is that Daily Notes can serve as a repeatable daily dashboard—either through built-in static templates or through external automation for more date-aware, dynamic content.