Managing Daily Notes
Daily notes live at _daily/YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD.md (or wherever the knowledge base's conventions.md says). Not every day has a note; gaps are normal.
Finding
- Today / a specific date: search for the full path (
_daily/**/YYYY-MM-DD.md) — never by bare filename, which can match elsewhere - Most recent: highest year folder → highest month folder → highest date file
- Reading a daily note never needs permission — read freely
Creating
- Determine the target date; create the
YYYY/MM/folders if missing - Structure: frontmatter (
type: daily,created/modified= the date), a## Taskssection, a## Notessection — or the KB's own daily template if one exists in its templates folder - Carry over tasks: find the most recent prior note, copy every incomplete task (
- [ ]) into the new note's Tasks section, preserving order. Stamp each carried task with provenance the first time it moves forward — append(since YYYY-MM-DD)using the date of the note you're carrying from (preserve an existing(since …)rather than overwriting). This makes staleness computable later. If more than ~15 tasks would carry over, don't blindly copy them all — surface the count and ask the user whether to carry, drop, or defer the backlog; an unbounded carry compounds daily into noise.
Updating
Tasks:
- Mark complete (
- [ ]→- [x]) or reopen — no permission needed, just do it - New tasks: tasks are ordered by priority top-to-bottom; ask where a new one ranks, or place it sensibly and say where
- Don't reorder existing tasks unless asked
Notes section: end-of-day summaries, work-in-progress context too verbose for a task line, and links to the notes touched today (per the KB's link style — daily notes are the spine the rest of the base hangs off).
End-of-day pass (when asked to "close out the day")
- Mark finished tasks; flag stale ones — using each task's
(since YYYY-MM-DD)stamp, anything carried more than ~5 days — and ask whether to drop, defer, or keep them - Summarize the day's work in the Notes section, linking the relevant notes
- Anything durable that surfaced today → offer
/second-brain:capturing-knowledgerather than letting it die in the daily note