What a comfort is this journal. I tell myself to myself & throw the burden on my book & feel relieved.
- Anne Lister
What is daily notes?
Daily notes, for me, is the collection of everything that happened on that particular day, added into some sort of permanent storage either in a physical form of a book or in electronic format. Daily notes provide you with a one-stop place where you can truly express yourself, and channel yourself, with no filters, which is personally therapeutic. Self-expression allows us to understand ourselves and process our emotions. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is, how at peace are we with ourselves, and what better way to understand ourselves, than write a story for our future selves, by talking with our present self.
Advantages of daily notes
Track progress
- You would think 6 months is no meaningfully large amount of time, but the amount you can make, and would have already made so far in the last 6 months will be mind-blowing.
- The brain tends to smoothen out our stories and stuff.
- Just try to remember something of not so much importance like 3 months ago, unless you have a really good memory, the details would have faded, especially the ones which you didn’t bother much about.
- So in our minds, we feel like recent times have been stagnant or meaningless, most of the time. You would be surprised about how much different your current life/mindset/headspace is, relative to the recent past.
Improve mental health — Reduce stress and anxiety
- Take this with a pinch of salt (or a bunch of it), I am not qualified to say this medically in any sort of form or fashion
- This is purely a personal experience as suggested by others who were probably qualified to do so, and probably circumstantial evidence at best for all I know.
- Over time, I felt more and more relaxed, and stress-free, the more I wrote. It feels channeling my thoughts clearly onto a sheet, the more I felt like I understood what was going on.
- The thing I realized about stress is, if not expressed it would have kept stacking in me, until one day it crashed, and took me down with it.
- By trying to express my thoughts on a piece of paper or a computer screen, I had to go through the process of unraveling my spaghetti of a brain and its thoughts, which gave me much-needed clarity on the matter.
Improve memory
- Or at least have a backup of one,
- The fact that you can just open it anywhere and figuratively time-travel to a previous day and live it again, that’s insane
- especially with modern journalism using technology you can add pictures, etc, which brings it more to life than ever before
Have a lot of stories to tell
- If watching How I Met Your Mother taught me one thing, its that I just don’t have enough memory to tell my kids the stories as Ted did
- So by writing it down, I can make it pretty secure, and who knows, perhaps one day, compile it into a memoir or an autobiography
Personal experience
- I have been writing a daily note in Obsidian for the last 200+ days at the time of the article
- One thing I have realized is that, although it could be boring at first, once it becomes a habit, it feels bad to miss a day, because you know, your memory will keep fading away eventually and you wouldn’t have any memory of that particular, however insignificant it was.
So what can you write
Whatever you want, yes that’s the best part, in whatever fashion you want, because in the end, this is for you, and you only mainly
Some examples of what you could write are:
- who you interacted with
- what you did for the entire day, in as much or as little detail as you want
- positive/negative highlights of the day
- whatever food/drinks you had (if you are counting calories etc.)
- Integrate with any other notes you already have, to create links and connections
So how do I get started?
Using modern software like Notion, or Obsidian, this is pretty easy to get started, just start with a generic template, which can be tweaked in the future as per your needs. There are hundreds, if not thousands of templates freely available online, figure out what’s best for you, and more than anything, just start writing!.
Keep a diary, someday it will keep you
- Mae West
PS: I am speaking in the broader sense of the word “daily notes”, which could be related to, but not limited to many ready to use software which helps in the same. The word “daily notes” refers to no particular product/service, but in the general sense of the word itself.
Suggested Reading
- Building a Second Brain — A book by Tiago Forte
