I have been thinking about ways to optimize time series based note taking. Now, while I do have git tracking for how I change files over time, I don’t think this is descriptive enough in the content of the note itself. A recommendation I saw from the CEO of Obsidian, Kepano, mentions to link to daily notes as a means of updates. For example, if I have a journal of continuous updates to a certain project, say the Sprinter Van for example, I would write headings that link to the daily notes, even if it had nothing to do with said daily notes whatsoever.
I like this idea because it allows me to have a more granular view of when I made updates to certain projects, and it also allows me to see the context of what else was going on in my life at that time. For example, if I made a note about the van on December 1st, 2025, I could link to my daily note for that day, which might include other things I was working on or thinking about.
This also allows me to backtrace what I did on a certain day with much easier interface. This has been possible before, but only with long scripts working with the very rich git timeseries data. By linking to daily notes as often as possible, it becomes a lot more approachable.
One Day Update ( 12-17-2025 )
I have been trying to force myself to use this technique to see if I like it, and I do think this is something I can integrate into my daily writing routine.
Beyond the time series tracking aspirations I had yesterday when writing this, I have found it enriches the content of the daily note itself. Oftentimes I feel like I am put in a spot where I have to do a lot of writing at the end of the day and summarize everything I did in the daily notes own outgoing links. While I will still try to do this, the new approach allows me to combine the semantic “thoughts” of that day via outgoing links with the subconscious “what I actually did that day” backlinks.
This won’t replace time series tracking at all, and quite frankly there are a lot of circumstances where daily note updates don’t really fit in. A great example is just about any learning focused content note. But for my “mind mapping” and journaling work, I think it is the perfect fit. The best example of this was a short passage I wrote today as an update to On Current Relationships (2025). This was something I wrote a long time ago that was quite personal, and this daily note update indicated semantically how time had changed, and that it was an update. It will also allow me in the future to track how my thoughts on that part of my life have shifted.
Overall, I will try to integrate this technique more, but I am going to keep it to notes that can inherently be “updated” in a way where you want to show an update. For anything that prioritizes the final product over the process, it is not a good fit. In addition, these parts are always “accumulation” based edits, where a new section is added, rather than editing/removing old content.
01-09-2026 New Use for System
Have recently adopted the idea of using fragment notes, which include the date and exact time the note was taken as a means to capture instantaneous and random ideas that just come to me in the spur of the moment, for which I can then summarize in daily notes. I came back to this note mentioning this with an update because this allows me to actually, automatically link to the daily note in the front matter of each fragment. That said, you can now go to a said daily note, see all the fragments that were written that day, and any other note that was mentioned or updated on that day. This makes the daily note a much better interface for seeing what was done in this day in history or what had to be done. Any event really that happened on that. And I like where this is going.