How I Use Daily Notes in Obsidian to Build Context for My AI

TL;DR: I log daily notes in Obsidian to build up context for my AI agents to understand what is going on in my life. It’s like a diary, but a more compact version. Most days I just talk through my day and let Claude shape it into the same template. It only takes a few minutes, and those notes quietly feed three things: my monthly summaries, my quarterly check-in with my husband Daniel, and the context my AI has about my life.

As a busy working mom, it’s hard to remember everything I do

I believe my mind is made for thinking, analyzing and learning, not for storing data. I’m much better at working out what a decision means than at remembering what I ate on a Tuesday or what I decided last month and why.

The daily note is how I stopped asking my brain to be a filing cabinet. When I was younger, I loved keeping diaries, but I genuinely don’t have much time to write these days. Plus, my daily entries are a lot more useful digitized, as it helps me in my quest to build a second brain (future blog entry will be written on this!).

This is my third post in my Obsidian series. The first one covers why I use Obsidian as a context vault for AI, and the plugins post covers a few basic tools. This one is the habit that helps fill the vault.

My template has six sections

Every note starts from the same template. Templater (the plugin) stamps the date, the day of the week and the week number, then links to yesterday and tomorrow. (The plugins post has the install steps, so I won’t repeat them here.) Below the header, the sections are always the same:

# Tuesday, November 3, 2026

← [[2026-11-02]] | [[2026-11-04]] →

## 3 Notes from Today
1.
2.
3.

## Work

## Projects

## Family & Household

## Capture
*Thoughts, ideas, things to research, things to decide later.*

## End of Day
**Thoughts:**
-

3 Notes from Today is the section I fill in with the most care. It isn’t a summary of the day. It’s a list of the three things that mattered most, and I try to give it as much detail as possible, since Obsidian is great with linking to other notes. This helps me continue to build out the knowledge graph of my life. Choosing is the useful part, because it forces me to decide what actually mattered.

Work opens with a short paragraph that frames the day, then a few labeled bullets.

Projects is usually one line, and unfortunately, it’s often just “No project work today” because I have been so busy with everything else.

Family & Household is plain bullets, anything that stands out to me regarding the kids or our family.

Capture is for thinking, not to-dos. It holds ideas, patterns I noticed in myself, and decisions I want to sit with. Once a week, I go through Capture and move the keepers into an Inbox note for follow-up.

End of Day is one short reflection, usually about what I’m grateful for.

Specific beats vague

One thing I’d recommend if you’re starting a daily note habit: write the specific detail. “Had a nice lunch” is useless to me in three months, and it’s useless to an AI trying to understand my life. “Taiwanese steak with black pepper sauce at the Flushing food court, and the mushroom noodles were great too” is something I can actually search, remember and use.

How a note actually gets written

With the lack of time, my notes have to be easy to write, or I would not be able to keep up the habit. I don’t aim to log everything every day, but I’d say I write about 6 times a week. Some days I type it myself. On most days, I do a messy brain dump about what happened and let Claude turn it into the template (ex. prompt: “Claude please turn the following into a daily note”). I built a skill for this, so I don’t re-explain the format every time.

The skill follows a few rules:

1. It edits in place. If I already started today’s note, it adds to it and never overwrites it.
2. It reads my last two notes first. My template drifts over time, and this keeps the new note matching my current format and voice.
3. It checks my calendar, but only as a supplement. My calendar isn’t a meeting log. Mostly, it’s where I record what I had for dinner. Meetings also get cancelled, so if a calendar event isn’t in my brain dump, Claude asks me about it and doesn’t assume it happened.
4. It never embellishes. This is the rule I care about most.

If my phrasing is ambiguous about whether something happened, I want Claude to leave it out or ask. A note that’s wrong is worse than no note, since I’ll trust it later.

What the notes feed

A single daily note isn’t worth much, but a few months of them are. I only started these in May of this year, but it’s pretty cool to be able to do an end of the year review next month and be able to have AI tell me what I did in the second half of the year instead of trying to remember it from my already packed brain.

Monthly summaries. AI reads the month’s daily notes and drafts a summary: the themes, the highlights, what could have gone better, and the goals. I review and edit it. Because the daily notes are specific, the summary is too.

My quarterly check-in with Daniel. Once a quarter, Daniel and I sit down for a life check-in (will blog about this in the future), and we start by reading the monthly summaries. That’s only the start of the meeting, but it saves us from relying on memory, so the time goes to talking about what the months meant and not to reconstructing what happened.

Context for my AI. The notes tell Claude what’s going on in my life, my work and my family. When I ask for help planning a trip or thinking through a decision, it already knows the background, so I’m not briefing a stranger every time. (The context vault post explains why this matters.)

The daily note, the monthly summary and the quarterly meeting are one system. The daily note is the input that makes everything after it fall into place.

What it costs, and where it falls short

The cost is a few minutes a day. The risk is that the habit breaks. I’ve missed days, but I don’t really see that as a big deal. If some days are not that memorable, I don’t need to log it. I’d rather have an honest gap than a made-up entry.

The other limit is privacy, which I think about a lot. I keep certain things out of the vault and out of my AI chats, and I wrote about where I draw that line in Where I Draw the Line on AI and Privacy.

Try it yourself this week

You don’t need my exact setup. Start small and let it grow.

1. Set up the note. Install Periodic Notes in Obsidian and make a template with sections that fit your life. The plugins post walks through it.
2. Keep one forcing question. Mine is the “3 Notes from Today” section. Pick one prompt that makes you decide what mattered.
3. Brain dump, don’t write. At the end of the day, say or type everything that happened, in any order, and let AI do the formatting.
4. Do it for a week, then turn it into a skill. Once the format feels right, have AI write down the method so you never re-explain it.

Here’s the prompt I’d start with for step 3. Swap in your own template:

Here's a brain dump of my day. Turn it into today's daily note using the template below.

Rules:
- Use only what I said. Don't embellish or dramatize.
- Keep every specific detail: names, dishes, numbers, places.
- If something is ambiguous, ask me instead of guessing.
- Put the three most notable things at the top, as full sentences.

Template:
[paste your template]

Brain dump:
[paste or say your day]

And this is the prompt for step 4, once you’ve done it for a week:

Look at the daily notes we've written together and the corrections I made along the way.
Turn this method into a reusable skill I can save. Include my template, my rules about
specific detail and not embellishing, how to use my calendar, and the questions you
should ask when something is ambiguous.

The second prompt is the one that pays off. After a week, the method stops living in my head and starts living in a skill, so the next note takes a few minutes.

I hope (and plan to) keep up this habit for, well, the rest of my life. How else will my kids be able to build a replica of me when I’m gone, a la Black Mirror? Kidding, sort of.

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