Calendar (Time)

Time-based notes such as periodic notes, journals, and logs belong in the Calendar folder.

Periodic notes

My periodic notes about each day, week, month, quarter, and year across the time horizons of my life are located under Calendar since they are all time-based. Initially, I'm experimenting with just having all my periodic notes under Calendar/Notes to see how that works.

Date folders

I have been using a dated hierarchy of subfolders by year/month/day under Calendar/Notes. For example, my Day Note (2024-09-08) for 8 Sep 2024 is located within the folder path 2024/09/08.

It might be simpler to have fewer hierarchical date folders, but that means I will have a huge list of files that will continually grow longer and longer. Of course, I could break that up into a current year folder, with another one for all past years.

Past & future

There are at least 382 files for each year (365 days, 12 months, 4 quarters, and 1 year). So maybe having month and/or day subfolders might make sense after all. That would also allow all notes for each day to be grouped together in each day subfolder. I will experiment with this, and see what seems to make the most sense.

Sections

My periodic notes have a common structure that includes sections for Plan, Journal, Log, Health, and Review. These provide consistency across time horizons for each day, week, month, quarter, and year.

Shortcuts

I use Shortcuts to provide automated Daily Startup and Capture workflows. Daily Startup automatically creates my periodic notes every morning, and Capture allow me to quickly capture information from anywhere for recording in these sections.

Sometimes, I will refactor paragraphs and lists from these sections into separate linked notes, so I have also provided options that allow storing directly in separate journal or log notes.

Journals

Journal notes with sparks, ideas, thoughts, questions, actions, freewriting, and reflections belong within the Calendar space because they are also time-based.

These usually consist of text paragraphs of thoughts that might be captured or developed with freewriting or freetalking (voice dictation).

Time horizons

I can choose either a day journal where I might include an optional time stamp for a journal entry. Or I use a week journal where I also sections for each day's journal entries. I could also select a month, quarter, or year journal, if appropriate; in that case, I provide a date-time stamp.

Logs

I capture time-stamped logs on list items and groups of events, experiences, health, diabetes, exercise, meals, etc., which also belong under Calendar since they are time-based.

These are simple Markdown lists: bullet (- ), numbered (1. ), or checkbox (- [ ]), and they can be indented (and folded) to identify list groups and dependencies.

Metadata

While writing my notes, it also helps to write about the notes with metadata on list items to identify my sparks, thoughts, ideas, questions, and actions. This allows me to record them for processing later without distracting my current focus.

Views

I use the metadata in a Log View with Dataview queries that help me process these items during my ARC Review practices for the day, week, and month.

Review

My Review section has highlights, accomplishments, challenges, and assessments. This provides an opportunity at the end of each time period to reflect on the past, and preview my future. The plus-minus-next approach seems to work fairly well.

Plan

My Plan section includes intentions, schedule, time-blocks, and focus activities for the time period. For example, this indicates what actions I want to get done today, and when I intend to do them.

At the end of each time period during my review, I look ahead and plan what needs to be done next so that I'm prepared for the next day, week, month, quarter, or year. That preview gives me a jump start on my plan when I begin that subsequent periodic note.