Daily notes considered harmful
Daily notes are useless. The value of a note is directly proportional to the number of times it is visited. That value is exponentiated each time a note is shared. Daily notes aren't revisited and they aren't shared.
Daily notes look like this:
notes/
yyyy-mm-dd.md
yyyy-mm-dd.md
yyyy-mm-dd.md
On the surface, the idea of a note per day seems great. You plan out your day and track your work. You can revisit the past if needed. But you won't. All you are doing is generating digital clutter. You will also never share these notes, so the chance of their value increasing exponentially is zero.
Instead you should focus on creating notes that you are likely to revisit or likely to share.
Focus.md
I have one note that I visit all the time when I am working. It's a single Markdown file that I constantly update. It's essentially a to-do list that just helps me juggle all the things that I need to track. I call it focus.md
# Focus
Tasks that I have to do
## Periphery
Tasks that I have to be aware of, but I don't have to do.
It's nice because it lets me offload information that I don't need at hand and helps me focus on what I need to do.
Don't ask the same question twice
I try to never ask the same question twice. That means that when I do have a question, that question and its answer get a note.
They look something like this:
# Issue
## Issue details
## Resolution
Since I'm a programmer, I make a lot of these notes. I don't visit them very often, but I do revisit them if the same issue pops up again. But these notes find their value in being shared. If another person encounters the same issue, and I am able to help them fix it, then the note is worth the cost of its creation. I even add a lot of these notes to our documentation so I don't have to share them by hand.
It took me a while to figure out what's worth recording, and what isn't. And I am sure that it will be something different for you. But tools are supposed to prevent toil. Don't waste your time with daily notes.