--- title: Daily Notes tag: daily-notes summary: >- Write a note for a day, a week, a month, a quarter, or a year, and keep a record of which periods you wrote. --- # Daily Notes A daily note is a document you write for a period of time, and a record that says which period it belongs to. This guide sets Daily Notes up, writes today's note, and shows what the record makes possible once you have a few weeks of them. Nothing here creates notes for you. There is no schedule and no background job — a period has a note only if you made one. ## Prerequisites A workspace where you can install plugins. ## The system A note is two things. The **document** is where you write. It is an ordinary document, in the document tree, with a template if you configured one. Nothing about it is special: you can move it, rename it, link it, search it. The **record** is a row saying which period that document is the note for. Records live in a table called **Daily Notes**, one row per note, with the period's start date, its cadence, and the document. Everything that reads a note reads the record. That is the part worth holding onto, because it decides two behaviours you would otherwise have to guess at: - **Where new notes are filed is a setting, and only affects new notes.** Change the path pattern and the notes you already wrote stay exactly as reachable as before, because nothing looks for them by rendering that pattern. - **A period has one note.** A period is identified by its start date and its cadence, so any date inside it addresses the same note. Ask for this week's note on Wednesday and again on Friday and you get one note, filed under that week's anchor weekday. There are five cadences — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly — and each is turned on separately. Turning one off stops new notes of that kind; the ones you already wrote stay readable. You reach a note from four places: 1. **Focus**, which shows the current note of the kind you pick and lets you step back through earlier ones. 2. **Calendar**, which marks each day that has a note. 3. **Tables**, where **Daily Notes** is an ordinary table you can sort, filter, and build views over. 4. The **Daily Note** workflow node, which creates or looks up a note from a workflow. ## Setting it up **1. Install the plugin.** Open **Plugins**, find **Daily Notes**, and choose **Install**. This creates the **Daily Notes** table this workspace records notes in. **2. Choose a timezone.** Under **Settings**, set **Timezone** to the zone that decides which day it is for you. It is `UTC` until you change it. **3. Turn on the cadences you want.** Each of **Daily**, **Weekly**, **Monthly**, **Quarterly**, and **Yearly** has its own **Enabled** switch. Turn on **Daily** to follow the rest of this guide. **4. Say where new notes are filed.** **Path Pattern** is a slash-separated path; the last segment is the document's title and the rest are folders, created if they are not there. The daily default is: ``` Notes/Daily/{{ date:YYYY }}/{{ date:YYYY-MM-DD }} ``` which files today's note as `2026-08-26` inside `Notes/Daily/2026`. The placeholders are `{{ date }}`, `{{ date:YYYY }}`, `{{ date:YYYY-MM }}`, `{{ date:YYYY-MM-DD }}`, `{{ date:YYYY/MM/DD }}`, `{{ date:MMM D }}`, `{{ date:MMMM D }}`, `{{ year }}`, `{{ month }}`, `{{ day }}`, `{{ week }}`, `{{ quarter }}`, and `{{ cadence }}`. **Note**: a placeholder that is not on that list is left in the path as you typed it, braces and all, so a typo shows up as a folder called `{{ dat:YYYY }}` rather than as an error. **5. Point at a template, or do not.** **Template Document Id** picks a document template to build new notes from. Leave it empty and a note starts blank. Templates live in a root folder named `Templates`, and a template's own `{{ title }}`, `{{ date }}`, and `{{ time }}` are filled in when the note is created. **6. For weekly notes, pick the anchor.** **Preferred Day** is the weekday a week's note is filed under. It is what makes every day of that week reach one note. ## Writing a note Open **Focus**. Under **Daily note** there is a **Create** button when the day has no note yet. Choosing it creates the document, records the note, and opens it in place. That is the whole gesture, and it is meant to be one you make on purpose. The thirty seconds where you decide what the day is for is the reason to have a daily note at all, so nothing produces one on your behalf. The two carets beside the heading step to the previous and next note you wrote. They step over notes, not over days: with nothing written between Tuesday and Friday, one press covers the gap. **Today** returns you to the current day. With more than one cadence turned on, a picker beside the heading switches Focus between them — **Daily**, **Weekly**, **Monthly**, and so on. Everything above then applies to that kind: **Create** writes this week's or this month's note, the carets step between weekly or monthly notes, and the button that returns you reads **This week** or **This month**. **Note**: if you delete a note's document, the record outlives it. Focus says the note was written and its document has since been deleted, rather than offering to create one over the top. ## Seeing the run of them Open **Calendar** in month view. Every day with a note carries a small green sunrise beside the date; clicking it opens the note. A month of them shows the days you kept up and, more usefully, the days you did not. The mark appears in week and day view too, on the column header. **Note**: the calendar reads the record, so a day is marked whether or not its document still exists. Opening the mark is where a deleted document is reported. ## What the record gives you **Daily Notes** is an ordinary table, so everything a table can do applies to it. Open it under **Tables** and you get every note you have written, searchable and sortable by any of its columns. Build a data view over it and the same rows become a table or a card list on a Pegboard, narrowed by a filter on `cadence` and ordered by `date`, with no workflow behind it. For anything with logic in it, the **Daily Note** workflow node has three operations. `create` makes the note for a period, or hands back the one already there. `get` answers whether a period has a note without creating one. `list` returns every note in a date range. A weekly review that gathers what you wrote is `list` over the last seven days, an **AI Agent** to summarise them, and `create` on the weekly cadence to write the result somewhere. This is also where you opt back into automation on your own terms. A **Cron Trigger** into `create` makes the day's note for you — and unlike a built-in schedule it can carry your rules: a **Branch** on the weekday skips weekends, and nothing stops you skipping a week you are away. The plugin does not do this because a schedule that fires for everyone produces notes nobody opens; a workflow you wrote is a decision you made and can change. `get` is the other half. Scheduled, it answers whether the day has been written without writing it, which is what a nudge is built on. ## Bringing older notes in A workspace that used Daily Notes before it kept records has documents but no rows, so its calendar shows nothing and Focus cannot page back. Open **Plugins**, **Daily Notes**, and choose **Upgrade** under **Upgrades**. It looks where your current path pattern points, for every period in the last two years, and records what it finds. **Note**: notes filed somewhere your current path pattern no longer points are not found. That is the limitation the record exists to remove going forward — from here on, moving the path pattern cannot lose anything.