I asked in another discussion about using a bullet journal with a JD system, and here’s what I’ve come up with so far. I think the two ideas are greatly complementary.
Long story short, I use the daily note feature of Obsidian to keep the journal, and in each entry, I add a heading with a link to the relevant ID that I worked on that day. Below the heading, I note whatever updates I have about the ID. See the screenshot below for an example.
This works well for me because it focuses the work I do each day. During reflection, if I can’t find any relevant IDs for the things I did, then that means I either need a new ID or I didn’t use my time productively (which is fine sometimes). I remember an amusing phrase from Johnny like “things you do should have IDs. If it’s not important enough to create an ID for it, then why are you doing it?”—but with more amusing phrasing .
The journal files themselves go in 00.04 Journal in my system, where the date in the note’s title keeps them in order.
A side benefit if you’re using Obsidian is that with all the wiki links that add up pointing to a particular ID over time, you can see a visible indication of your work on something in the graph view.
Anyway, that’s the gist of it. Figured I’d share in the chance that somebody might find the idea useful.
I want to add that I’ve found this method very helpful as a teacher, where each lesson is an ID. The daily journal gives me a place for reflecting on teaching issues and how lessons went versus what was planned. It also gives me a place to record to-dos and administrative tasks, which I mark with a #tag to find them easily later. Since each journal entry is linked to that day’s lesson IDs, it also gives me a place at the beginning of the work day to see what lessons I’ll be teaching and to prepare those lessons as necessary. It’s made my life as a teacher a whole lot more organized.
On a related note, I also want to share how I organize my life as a teacher within a JD system. The A-Z Courses area contains my courses with their three-character categories. For example, M03 English III is Middle school English, third semester. Crucially, this leaves space for each lesson to have its own ID while honoring the depth limits of the JD system, and this is what allows me to link to them easily in the journal entries. Teachers who have trouble staying organized might consider a similar system.
@LasTr, thanks for sharing. I am intrigued by this but can’t quite visualize how it looks on the graph or what’s useful about having links to your daily notes on the graph. Could you say a little bit more about that maybe share a screenshot of (a portion of) your graph?
For context around my question, I currently keep a digital handwritten BUJO using Goodnotes on my iPad. The handwriting search capability is so good that I often just leave detailed notes related to my IDs there, but if I know I’ll really frequently want to have that detail when working directly in Obsidian I end up copying it into my obsidian notes on the ideas. That knowing is a pressure point and I sometimes forget something that was captured several months ago in Goodnotes only. Moving my BUJO practice to Obsidian might fix this.
Yes, sure! Actually, I guess it’s not all that useful to have them all showing up on your graph, but I honestly don’t use the graph feature all that much anyway. Each daily note is linked to one or more lessons. At work, my todos are marked with #todo and they all live in the daily notes. I also link the to-do tasks to the relevant lesson plan because I might need to refer to them or their handouts. Through backlinks on the lesson plan, I can also see which day or days I referred to it, which can help me remember when I first taught the lesson.
Above is an example graph view from my work JD system of a syllabus document’s local graph, with depth=2 and neighbor links on. Each red dot is a lesson plan, yellow is a daily note, and green is a materials library. The dark dot in the middle is the main node of the local graph.
I agree that it can create a dilemma if you want to keep such things in different places. I was recently gifted a reMarkable paper tablet, which I really like writing in. I’ve done some journaling in it, as well, but I’ve run into the same problem you describe. I haven’t decided whether I’ll continue writing in there, although this would be a great excuse to pick it up and use it. For work stuff, I keep it all in Obsidian, though. I just haven’t decided yet how I’ll use it at home.
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