How I Use Obsidian to Better Understand How I Operate (Sep 2024)

I was hanging out in the DiscoLink Club and came across this question from one of the members:

Lately have been making an effort to track various aspects of my day to day between side work and personal. Looking at tools like Obsidian to help organize the details and better understand myself and the way I operate.

Any folks here who have gone down that path and have a resource or two that my be helpful? Thanks in advance.

When I read it, it resonates with a time old question that I feel that many of us seek to answer:

So you have spent a lot of time "getting things done," but where did the time actually go?

While my system is far from perfect, this blog post is a snapshot of my journey to finding a better way to answer that question.

What is my preferred app?

My go to app for better understanding of myself is Obsidian.

The reason is a simple one: If I'm going to document where my time goes, that's solely for my understanding and knowledge. Especially with the given state of note-taking tools all integrating AI features, the concern of my data being used to train models without my consent is at an all time high.

What plugins do I use?

Here are the core plugins that I use for my current system:

1. Periodic Notes - If the goal is to understand where time goes, this plugin is essential because it makes the flow of generating and managing "timestamp notes*" way easier.
2. Templater - While Obsidian does come with its own templating system, I've found this custom one to be easier to work with and more powerful in comparison at this point.

* Timestamp notes are what I refer to as notes that represent a particular segment of time. Examples include daily notes (e.g., 2024-09-05), weekly notes (e.g., 2024-W35), monthly notes (e.g., 2024-09), quarterly notes (e.g., 2024-Q3) and yearly notes (e.g., 2024).

What's my workflow?

1. Use daily notes to track what's happening even if it's only at a high level. It doesn't have to be what is essentially a list replica of my calendar plus some extra things.
2. Use weekly notes to set a higher priority and objective for the week. This is where I try to be more detailed about capturing things because it's enough data to be useful for reflection but not so massive you're buried in data analysis.
3. Use monthly notes as a good way to group items. This one is not as critical for me because I prefer to think at the quarterly level, but I find it useful because I do want to think in terms of months sometimes and it's nice to summarize things that happened in here.
4. Use quarterly notes for the next level up. This is my primary strategic planning unit at this point. This is especially useful if you're a fan of the 12 Week Year.
5. Finally, use year notes to capture the highest level of abstract goals. I'll admit that I'm not the best at using this yet because I find that things change so drastically throughout the year that I haven't found a workflow that works well at this level yet beyond really abstract goals at the beginning and then reflecting at the end of the year.

Drawbacks to my workflow

My system is far from perfect. In fact if it were up to me, I'd only share this when it was more mature and "ready for show and tell," but in the effort of living up to the principle of "progress of perfection," it's why this blog post exists.

Drawbacks to acknowledge for the way I do things include:

1. It's very manual because it's text heavy. I enter and format everything manually to keep it consistent, but this means that if I want to modify things across all the notes, it's nearly impossible due to the way it's currently built.
2. Data aggregation is tricky at best. Because it's so text heavy, it means that there's no real standard for aggregating data to calculate down to the minute how much time goes where. It's more of a rough sketch and outline so I have a feel for what it or is not working.

Closing thoughts

This is a hard problem and to my knowledge, no one has figured out a way to do this in a way that minimizes time invested and maximizes the insights we get out of the system. It's a problem I know that I won't be letting go of any time soon, so keep an eye out here to get updates as I continue down this rabbit hole.

Addendum

While I originally planned to go into how I do each step, I realized that that would be best accomplished as their own blog posts. That said, I don't want to leave you completely hanging, so here's my templates for the daily and weekly notes:

Daily Note

<% tp.file.include("[[Daily Note Frontmatter (Section Template)]]") %>
## 🤔 Looking Back...

**Three years ago:**

![[<% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD", "P-3Y", tp.file.title, "YYYY-MM-DD") %>#📑 Summary]]

**Two years ago:**

![[<% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD", "P-2Y", tp.file.title, "YYYY-MM-DD") %>#📑 Summary]]

**A year ago:**

![[<% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD", "P-1Y", tp.file.title, "YYYY-MM-DD") %>#📑 Summary]]

**4 weeks ago:**

![[<% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD", "P-4W", tp.file.title, "YYYY-MM-DD") %>#📑 Summary]]

**Last week:**

![[<% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD", "P-1W", tp.file.title, "YYYY-MM-DD") %>#📑 Summary]]

**Yesterday:**

![[<% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD", "P-1D", tp.file.title, "YYYY-MM-DD") %>#📑 Summary]]

<% tp.file.include('[[Journal Summary (Section Template)]]') %>

## 🎯 Objectives

*What am I working towards?*

### 🐉 Personal

- [ ] 
- [ ] 
- [ ] 

### 💼 Work

- [ ] 
- [ ] 
- [ ] 

### 🤝 Connections

- [ ] 

## 🕰️ Timeline

*A representation of the activities for the day.*

### 🗓️ All Day

### ✨ Morning

- **06:00AM to 07:00AM**
    - [ ] 
    - [ ] 
- **07:00AM to 08:00AM**
    - [ ] 
    - [ ] 
- **08:00AM to 09:00AM**
    - [ ] 
    - [ ] 
- **09:00AM to 10:00AM**
    - [ ] 
    - [ ] 
- **10:00AM to 11:00AM**
    - [ ] 
    - [ ] 
- **11:00AM to 12:00PM**
    - [ ] 
    - [ ] 

### 🌤️ Afternoon

- **12:00PM to 01:00PM**
    - [ ] 
    - [ ] 
- **01:00PM to 02:00PM**
    - [ ] 
    - [ ] 
- **02:00PM to 03:00PM**
    - [ ] 
    - [ ] 
- **03:00PM to 04:00PM**
    - [ ] 
    - [ ] 
- **04:00PM to 05:00PM**
    - [ ] 
    - [ ] 
- **05:00PM to 06:00PM**
    - [ ] 
    - [ ] 

### 🌙 Evening
	
- **06:00PM to 07:00PM**
    - [ ] 
    - [ ] 
- **07:00PM to 08:00PM**
    - [ ] 
    - [ ] 
- **08:00PM to 09:00PM**
    - [ ] 
    - [ ] 
- **09:00PM to 10:00PM**
    - [ ] 
    - [ ] 

## 📊 Metrics

- 🌦️ Forecast: 16 hrs (6:00AM to 10:00PM)
    - 🐉 Personal: ❓ hrs
    - 💼 Work: ❓ hrs
    - 🤝 Connection:: ❓ hrs
    - 🛡️ Buffer:: ❓ hrs
- 📖 Log: ❓ hrs (❓ to ❓)
    - 🐉 Personal: ❓ hrs
    - 💼 Work: ❓ hrs
    - 🤝 Connection:: ❓ hrs

## 📝 Notes
``dataview
LIST
WHERE file.cday = this.file.day
``

Weekly Note Template

---
uuid: <% tp.file.creation_date("YYYYMMDDHHmmss") %>
created-on: <% tp.file.creation_date("YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss") %>
last-modified-on: <% tp.file.last_modified_date("YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss") %>
aliases: 
tags:
  - type/timeline/weekly
week: 
startDate: 
endDate: 
status: 📤 Upcoming
related: []
---
## 🎯 Objectives

###  🐉 Personal

- [ ] (🚩) Non-Negotiable Objective
- [ ] Regular Objective
- [ ] 

### 💼 Work

1. *Determine key objectives for each project*
2. *Assign 10 hours of research to learn something new*

- [ ] 
- [ ] 
- [ ] 


### 🤝 Connections

- [ ] 

## 📝 Notes

- 

## 📌 Pinned

``dataview
TABLE WITHOUT ID link(file.link, aliases[2]) as Day, Pinned
FROM #type/timeline/daily 
WHERE contains(related, [[<% tp.file.title %>]]) AND pinned
SORT file.name
``

## 🗓️ Daily Notes

``dataview
TABLE WITHOUT ID link(file.link, file.aliases[2]) as Date, status as "Status"
FROM #type/timeline/daily
WHERE contains(related, [[<% tp.file.title %>]])
SORT date(file.name) ASC
``