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 contains the following:

• 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.

• On workdays, we create a section for work. This is just a link to another Daily Pattern page, but specific to work, like [[Work/YYYYMMDD]]

• 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!