New obsidian Plugins: Journaling Bases

As you probably know, I’m a huge fan of journaling and periodic reviews.

My process is well-oiled, and I covered it in the above workshop, in my knowledge management course and in multiple articles.

So far, the whole process has been “labor intensive” for me. It’s mostly okay, but I’ve been thinking about codifying/easing the process for myself (and for others along the way).

The gist of it is as follows:

  • Review daily notes once a week to extract key learnings, discoveries, challenges faced, achievements, things you’re grateful for, etc and create a weekly note as a result

  • Review weekly notes once a month to extract key learnings, discoveries, …

  • Review …

Thanks to this process, at the end of a full year, you get a single yearly note that is basically a valuable summary of that year, giving you clarity about what you achieved, mistakes you’ve made, things you’ve learned, …

In addition to capturing information about the past, periodic notes also enable looking forward and planning ahead.

To ease my process, I’ve decided to build a new Obsidian plugin, creating dedicated views to help me out: https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-journal-base

Through this plugin, I intend to add at least two new Base view types:

  1. Periodic Notes to easily view/create/edit/navigate through daily/weekly/monthly... notes (timeline view): Already usable

  2. Periodic Review, providing side-by-side views periodic notes with foldable columns (Andy Matuschak's style): Work in progress

The Periodic Notes view lists all periodic notes aims to support daily journaling, with easier navigation between notes of a specific category (daily, weekly, …). It lists all the notes for the corresponding type in descending order, and enables folding/expanding and editing those. It also enables creating new ones for future periods, and creating missing ones in the sequence. The current period is also highlighted.

Here’s what it looks like:

The Periodic Review view has a different goal: serve during periodic reviews (eg weekly review, monthly reviews, ... up to yearly reviews) and make it a breeze to integrate information from daily notes to weekly notes, to quarterly notes … (depending on the types you decide to use).

You select or create a yearly note, then select or create a quarterly note, then a montly, weekly & daily.

For example, when selecting a certain week, you'll see all notes from that week in the column to the left. If you select a month, then you’ll see all of the weeks in that month, etc.

Here’s an early mockup of that view:

This is a free and open source project, so don’t expect miracles overnight. You can follow along if you’re interested, and even help build/improve it. All contributions are welcome (code, ideas, documentation, bug reports, etc).

I intend to include this plugin in future versions of the Obsidian Starter Kit.

Source code: https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-journal-base