Zettelkasten/Patterns/Daily Page Pattern

Summary of Pattern

The Daily Pattern consists of creating a page named [[YYYYMMDD]] to organize and assemble notes from that day.

By creating a new note/article to collect everything from a given day, it means there is a clean slate each day.

Interlinks from each day's page to other pages are crucial: many inter-wiki links create a link structure that allow easy navigation of the wiki. Each article in the wiki is a node in a network of interlinked pages; an article with lots of wiki links makes it easy to jump around the network.

Contents of Daily Pages

Sections on Daily Pages

Typically, each page will contain the following sections:

• Summary of Prior Day: A section that summarizes the prior day, plus a link to the prior day's wiki page. This section goes at the top of the page, so that it's easy to find and click. Going backwards two or three days is simple: click the link for the prior day's wiki page, and repeat two or three times. It's always at or near the top of the page.

• Work Daily Page: On workdays, we create a section for work, that's just a link to another Daily Pattern page specific to work, like [[Work/YYYYMMDD]]

• Links Section: A section to collect interesting links that we come across. Links will usually wind up with their own notes, but this is more for dumping copy-and-paste links we want to save.
  • If we end up going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole (often), we usually open links in new tabs as we go further down the rabbit hole - a good visual indicator of how deep the rabbit hole goes.
  • When we're ready for a break, we can copy all those links into a list in the links section, and now we've recorded that Wikipedia rabbit hole for future reference and exploration!

Categories on Daily Pages

One extra detail of daily pages, to make them easier to wrangle: we always tag a daily page with a category corresponding to the year and month, [[Category:YYYYMM]].

For example, the page [[20160101]] is from January 2016, so it would be tagged with the category [[201601]]. This can be useful for tagging daily pages, but also useful if tagging a note that's date-specific, but not necessarily a daily page or otherwise linked to that date.

For example, notes from a conference or workshop that occurs in January 2016 might also be tagged with [[201601]]. That year-month category will surface those notes.

Templates on Daily Pages

Main article: Zettelkasten/Patterns/Flags

Main article: Zettelkasten/Patterns/Monthly Pattern

One other thing that we do to make the wiki easier to navigate via clicking links only. At the bottom of each page, we include a special template for that month that includes links to all other daily pages from that month.

(A MediaWiki template is basically just a chunk of text that can be defined in one place, then dynamically inserted in multiple other places.)

Monthly Template

The monthly template is a simple box that goes at the bottom of the page. It contains an organized list of links related to a given topic. You define a template like {{January2016}} and it is a Flag with a list of links to every daily page in January: [[20160101]], [[20160102]], etc.

(To get more detailed, the monthly template is a Flag, which is a term we came up with for templates that provide useful navigation boxes with organized lists of links. See Category:Flag for applications on this public, non-Zettelkasten wiki.)

The monthly template also links to the monthly template to the prior and next months, so that a daily page like [[20160101]] would include the monthly template {{January2016}}, which would link to every other daily page for that month, but also link to {{December2015}} and {{February2015}}.

Scalability of Daily Pattern

What makes the Daily Pattern so useful is that it can scale very rapidly and very well, by making use of subpages, and by breaking more complicated topics out into their own separate pages/notes. When an idea becomes more complex, you can move the content to a subpage, [[YYYYMMDD/Subpage]], so that new ideas have a clean canvas, but you can still keep track of what ideas happened when.

If a topic is more complicated than a single-day effort, then the same principle applies, except creating a new topic page like [[Barbaz]] and linking to it from the daily page.

Subpages Example

Suppose one day you have a simple but captivating idea for a side project.

If the idea is just a simple idea you want to keep track of and come back to later, you can create a section in the daily page, and jot it down to refer back to later.

But suppose the idea is complicated, and more ideas start to roll in, and suddenly you're having a brainstorm. A simple section on a daily page is no longer enough to hold all the ideas, but the idea still isn't fully formed enough to create a whole topic page, Category page, set of tags, etc.

The solution? Create a subpage at [[YYYYMMDD/Foobar]]. On the daily page, the section where you were brainstorming about Foobar now links to that subpage. On the subpage, you have all the space to brainstorm that you want, on a nice, fresh, blank canvas. (It should also link back to the main daily page, using a template like {{Main}}, so it's easy to navigate via links, and include any Category that is relevant, to make it findable.)

Subpages As Bookmarks

Using the daily pattern described on this page, plus the subpage pattern described above, can help to compartmentalize information from a particular day into a separate page, while still keeping it connected to the context of what was being worked on that day.

We've found that we use the subpage pattern rarely enough that when we do create a subpage to collect a brainstorm or a large amount of information about a particular topic on a particular day, it creates a kind of bookmark in our memory about that information.

If you are making an important phone call, and create a new subpage to collect notes from that phone call, it can imprint the date and call in your memory, and make it easier to find later by looking for the appropriate Category page for the corresponding month.

Weaknesses of the Pattern

Low Throughput Situations

The biggest weakness of the daily pattern is that it is designed to start with a body of unstructured information, and provide structure to that information by segmenting it into separate, interlinked, categorized notes.

However, this pattern breaks down in low-throughput situations, when there is not much information or activity to categorize during a given day, and daily pages are consistently left unfilled.

In this case, information can become too siloed, pages can become empty and devoid of content, and a system that works to segment and categorize a large volume of information can completely choke on too small a volume of information.

Another problem is that starting each day with a blank page can feel like the wiki is swallowing all of your work, and nothing comes out. You lose track of work across days or weeks, if each day starts fresh and you don't have good mechanisms for looking backwards. (Starting fresh has its pros and its cons.)

How to Overcome the Low Throughput Situation

We are still experimenting with ways of overcoming the above issues, but one general principle we've found useful is persistence. Namely, chunks of text that are persistent across daily pages. This helps daily pages from feeling so empty or disconnected from everything that's come before.

(Note that the daily pages pattern could also be adapted to be a weekly or monthly pages pattern. Personally, we think weekly pages will make any page-naming schema messy, and monthly pages won't work because they cover too much time. But there are as many possibilities as there are people to try them, so you may find something that works for you.)

One useful pattern we have found is using a chunk of templated text, which gets included in each daily page, but is dynamically included, so it only needs to be updated in one place.

An example application of this is a template that is a simple bullet list of links to notes for ongoing projects in a given month. Suppose you are working on a dashboard project, and you have pages with notes about the dashboard software, a todo list for the project, and notes about the machine running the dashboard. Then the monthly projects template can include a link to all three, and each daily page will now link to the pages for that project, ensuring the project does not slip through the cracks.

Likewise, once the dashboard project is complete, it no longer needs to be included in the next month's projects template. The utility of the monthly projects template is not just that it persists across daily pages, but also that a new monthly projects template is made each month. If a project ends up in a dead end, or in the icebox, it won't make it to next month's projects template; if a project is getting more involved, then all of its detailed subpages, subtasks, and various todo lists can all go in the monthly projects template.

This makes sure that if you start a project, there's always a link on each daily page to that project's organizing page/note.