Managing Daily Notes

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

1. Determine the target date; create the YYYY/MM/ folders if missing
2. Structure: frontmatter (type: daily, created/modified = the date), a ## Tasks section, a ## Notes section — or the KB's own daily template if one exists in its templates folder
3. 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")

1. 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
2. Summarize the day's work in the Notes section, linking the relevant notes
3. Anything durable that surfaced today → offer /second-brain:capturing-knowledge rather than letting it die in the daily note