How to do a daily review in Obsidian

How to spend just 25 minutes preparing for each day and be confident you haven’t missed anything? I answer this question in this article...

The daily review is a very compact procedure. I spend just 20 to 30 minutes on a review every day. During this time, I go through 4 steps to fully prepare myself for a productive day. Here are these 4 steps:

1. Leadership

2. Review of tasks

3. Planning the day

4. Control.

The basis of everything described below lies in several basic approaches. First, there’s GTD by David Allen, as he describes in his book "Getting Things Done". Secondly, it's the systemic approach taught by the EEM Institute. However, the approach that I am developing and using, I would not call a mere copy of anything. Each tool described by me is the result of adaptation, grounding general approaches to the specifics of my activity.

When I started applying David Allen's GTD approach from the book "Getting Things Done," I quickly concluded that Allen's six-level system was missing an important step, or level. I called this level "Daily Review". What actually starts each of our new days? For some, it’s coffee, for others, a jog, some like to seclude themselves in a tiled room, but as I understood, these are just backgrounds for an important procedure, a backdrop for the practice - to gather one's thoughts about the upcoming day.

I don’t know how it happened, and why David Allen didn’t describe this level in the book, but I had to develop an approach, an algorithm, or checklist for myself, which I follow at least 5 days a week, often 6, though I confess, sometimes I skip. But I think skipping a day occasionally is not terrible if the system continuously works and updates.

As a program where I keep my own knowledge base, as well as use as a modeler, I chose Obsidian. Why I chose it, you can read in other posts of my blog.
In this post, I will describe how I update my system daily, to unload all the excess from my mind, and be confident that my exocortex, in the face of Obsidian, contains up-to-date information about my tasks, work, plans for today. I will not write about strategizing or planning at the level of week or even more so month. In this article, I consider exactly the day, exactly the daily routine for preparing myself and my exocortex for a new day.

Which Obsidian plugins I use

For the daily review, I settled on the following plugins for Obsidian:

1. Calendar

2. Periodic notes

3. Templates

4. Dataview

5. Outliner and Checklist

6. MetaEdit - but this is sometimes and not necessarily.

What the daily review consists of

The goal of the daily review, as a process, a task, is to update the information that is automatically collected in a special note "📆 Today". About what this note "📆 Today" consists of and its sections I wrote here in this article.

So, where does it all start? Every morning I open Obsidian and create a daily note using the Calendar plugin. It's pretty simple and convenient:

1. The plugin opens in the right panel of Obsidian as a calendar.

2. You click on the current day of the week and Obsidian automatically creates a note based on the template. My template for the daily note is called: "Daily review template".

3. After that, you start step-by-step filling in the "Daily review" note for the current day.

4. All the reviews ever created are saved in a separate "Daily" folder, with the date of the day the review was made as the file name. Additionally, in the Calendar plugin, the date of each day you made a review becomes a link, clicking on which opens the daily review note for the selected date.

The structure of the daily review note is a checklist that I go through sequentially from start to finish. I always perform this ritual before starting the day.

I want to highlight that the flexibility of Obsidian and the specifics of developing my own system allows for constant adaptation, changing the daily review template. Over the last year, my "daily review" template has significantly changed about 3 times, and small changes occur constantly. Some changes stick, from some I retract, in short, "Practice is the criterion of truth".

And so, the structure of the daily review. At the very beginning, I have a link to the note "My ideal start of the day" where I once described how I see the most pleasant, convenient start of the day. It's just a reminder, in case everything falls out of hands, or you want to get away from the routine. When the very thought of tasks makes one reluctantly stir thoughts in one's head. It's in such moments that simply reading about what can be done to feel nicer and better greatly helps catch the rhythm, enter the flow of a new day. Again, as I discover pleasant practices for starting the day, this note gets updated or rewritten.

Leadership

The next item is "Leadership". According to the methodology of the EEM Institute, leadership is a set of practices that allow you to persuade, force someone into the right role. In the context of the daily review, you have to be a leader in relation to yourself. You persuade, convince, place yourself in the necessary role: economist, manager, programmer, father, husband, etc. Only after that are you ready for productive problem-solving, task execution.

I think the content of this section largely depends on the character, personality type of each person. Regarding myself, I definitely know that I need a leadership stage, or more precisely, self-leadership. I write more about leadership in other posts of my blog. From a practical point of view, this stage looks like the practice of "Morning Pages" from the book "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron. Often, I need to spill out thoughts from my head in the form of simple text. As a result, thoughts become organized, and a clear picture of the upcoming day appears.

In addition, in case of stress, or feeling anxiety, the leadership stage helps to cope with emotions and move on to a sequential solution to problems that caused these emotions. Or just to see that in fact, there's no reason to stress.
Also, the results of such writing I often format as separate fleeting notes in Obsidian, for further processing as ideas for current projects or posts.
Thus, the "Leadership" stage of the daily review acts as a stage of reflection, to listen to the thoughts in one's own head, let your subconscious speak up, so that it calms down and allows you to calmly switch to slow thinking S2 according to Kahneman.

Usually, this stage takes me about 10-15 minutes.

Focus on the level of "day"

After the leadership stage comes the "Focus on the level of day" item. It consists of two subsections:

1. Review of tasks, target systems, stakeholders

2. Planning the day

Review of tasks

I start with the "Review of tasks" section. The task of this stage is to write drafts, or tags of tasks, that are spinning in my head after sleep. For this, I use a simple to-do list. Here, Outliner and Checklist plugins help. There's no automation here. I just realized that it's convenient to first write tasks from my head in the form of a simple list. And I like to tick off tasks :)

Starting the day by listing tasks that you have in your mind, this idea I read in the book by J.D. Meier "Getting Results the Agile Way" (if I'm not mistaken) about 10 years ago. For a while, I actively used a program written based on his ideas. And the last few years, the to-do list in MS Office has become identical to that program.

After fixing tasks from my mind, I open the calendar on my Mac and supplement the notes about tasks with planned meetings. As GTD by David Allen suggests, in the calendar should be only events that you have agreed upon with someone else. There should be no other tasks in it. I decided to strictly adhere to this idea and now I really like it. I use the default calendar from Apple, it's sufficient and works out of the box both on Mac and iPhone.

It takes 2 to 5 minutes to prepare this list.

After creating a general list of tasks from my mind and the calendar, I start fixing them in my exocortex Obsidian. The nuance here is that some tasks from my mind may already be in the exocortex, may already be planned. Extracting them from the mind often is important just from an emotional, psychological point of view. You wrote them down and the brain calms down and starts thinking about something else. This is mentioned by J.D. Meier in his book.

However, often from the mind, after sleep, come unexpected solutions to current problems, heuristics, insights. These unexpected solutions need to be accounted for in the form of:

1. tasks for projects

2. works within routine, tasks

3. calls

4. or ideas for the future

Therefore, the next step is to check each task from the list: is it in my exocortex or not, is it new. For this, in the second window of Obsidian, I open the page 📆 Today and see if among the tasks planned for today are those that I fixed in the simple list. If this task is already there, I just tick it off in the list and understand that I have already thought about it, and time for the task is already allocated, the task is already in Obsidian. And you calm down :)

If I see that the task is new, and it's not planned for today, I check if it's planned for another day. For this, I use the automatic report Priority projects with tasks. In it, all priority projects and tasks for them are automatically collected. If it's there, you calm down :)

If the task is not in Obsidian, I add it. If it's a task for a project, I add it as a new note according to the "Project task" template. Accordingly, if it's a call, then according to the template for a call. Specifically, about the structure of each type of notes, I write in other posts of my blog. Here, I draw attention to the importance of transferring data from a simple list to Obsidian, observing the data structure, which allows them to be automatically processed in tables. For example, in the note 📆 Today. After adding tasks... you calm down :)

Thus, at the stage of "Review of tasks, target systems, stakeholders" we update our lists of tasks, add tasks, jobs that correspond to the current situation of a new day. Which essentially corresponds to the GTD methodology.
This stage takes no more than 5 minutes.

Planning the day

After we have updated the task lists for the upcoming day, we move on to planning tasks for today. Here it's important to reconcile with the resources we have today. Do we have enough time to do all the planned work today? This stage consists of three steps:

1. My day's resources

2. Focus for today

3. Control

My day's resources

At the first step, I make a simple assessment of the resources of the current day. Before starting the workday, I estimate how much working time I have today. All this I formatted in the form of a simple table. At the same time, the actual data for today I fill in based on the conditions I'm in at the moment of filling the table, and the planned data I have filled in the template in advance. Here's an example of a filled table:

I want to highlight a few interesting points:

1. Time estimation is conducted in terms of 2 indicators: a large time slot and current tasks. What it is and why I distinguished them, I described in detail in another post of my blog. Here I'll just say in general terms. Every day we have to take into account our calendar, planned meetings, trips, meetings all this overlaps with our schedule. Or in the end, I can just start the daily tasks later than usual, just can oversleep :)

   However, the time of day when I'm most productive remains unchanged. For example, for me, it's the first half of the day. Therefore, I allocate a large time slot at the beginning of the day and plan some voluminous works, tasks, for example, writing an article. In turn, small or routine tasks I plan for less productive time. In my case, this is time immediately after lunch and up to 4:00 PM. Due to this, it's necessary to distinguish 2 indicators "Large slot" and "Current tasks".

2. The planned time I calculated in advance, in a separate note. More about how to do this and why, I write in another article of my blog. Here, I draw your attention to the fact that for convenience this indicator is calculated both in hours and in pomodoros. By pomodoros, I mean the Pomodoro technique by Francesco Cirillo. This is convenient for assessing the volume of work that I can do today. Once calculated, the planned indicators remain unchanged for quite a long time until my schedule changes due to some fundamental changes in my environment.

The last line in the table calculates the total amount of time I have today. In the example above, you can see that for some reason, my actual working time is 1.5 hours less than it could be.

This stage takes 1-2 minutes.

Focus for today

By this point in Obsidian, all the necessary information

has been gathered:

1. we have made a complete list of tasks that need to be done.

2. we have determined the volume of available time for completing tasks.

However, there remains one nuance. The list of tasks for today is not reconciled with the actual time we have. The thing is, we might not have completed some tasks yesterday, which we planned to finish yesterday, so they automatically stand for completion today. Or waking up in the morning you realized that you need to do an additional task, added it at the previous stage "Review of tasks,..." but the time for its completion turned out to be significant.

If we do not reconcile the available time and the list of planned tasks every day, then all automation in Obsidian turns into automated chaos. Tasks for today will accumulate. The volume of work in terms of time will exceed what we have available for today. And eventually, you'll give up this practice. Honestly, I lived and suffered from this deficiency in the system for about a month. :(

To avoid this situation I use the report "Work for the week or 7 days". This is also a separate note in which tables are automatically collected using the Dataview plugin.

The report consists of two sections:

1. Tasks with overdue execution date

2. Schedule of tasks for the days of the current week

In the first section, all tasks with an overdue execution date are collected, i.e., the execution date of the task is less than the current date. In other words, these are tasks that I did not manage to complete on time at some point in the past.
In the second section, the schedule for the current week from tasks for priority projects that I'm going to solve is collected.

The point of this stage is to "clean Augean stables" from the first section. All tasks that I did not manage to finish at some point I redistribute to the following days. The goal - to clear all tasks from the table "Tasks with overdue execution date". If you do not do this periodically, then all unfinished tasks accumulate in the report "📆 Today". Very quickly, the schedule for today turns into an unfeasible list of tasks. And you stop wanting to look there. Therefore, I check and redistribute overdue tasks every morning.

The second important point is to reconcile the time resources available today with the planned tasks. At the previous stage, we determined the available time for today. Meanwhile, the report "Work for the week or 7 days" contains information about the planned amount of necessary time for each task, work, as well as the total amount of time for each day of the week. The goal – to ensure that not more tasks are planned for today than the number of hours we have. If it turns out that today there is not enough time for all the work, I redistribute tasks to other days of the week. For this, the MetaEdit plugin may be convenient. It allows you to right-click on the note link to open not the note itself, but the editing window of its properties. However, it must be admitted that this plugin is far from perfection, so often I just open the specific task note and edit the property values directly in it.

Read about how I implemented this report using the DataView plugin in this article

This stage takes from 1 to 5 minutes.

Control

The last stage is the control of the list of tasks planned for today. Here everything is very simple. There are three items for checking all my tasks for today. I look at the report "📆 Today" and check:

1. Are there tasks from the High priority group?

2. Are there actions to maintain the body?

3. Are there actions for having money?

Control questions that allow to reconcile with important directions in my current life, have I planned at least one step in these directions. There's no automation here. I just tick off, or not. The list of these questions can change, and for each person, it can be their own.
This takes less than 1 minute.

Conclusion

Thus, the entire daily review takes me on average from 20 to 35 minutes. I think it's not much to gather and prepare for productive work for the whole day.