Zettelkasten/Patterns/Daily Page Pattern

Summary of the 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.

What Daily Pages Contain

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!

Scalability

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.

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.