Starting the year right with a daily note.

I'm a big fan of the Obsidian writing app and have been using it's calendar and template plugins to produce a daily note template which I fill out each morning before stand-up.

I've experimented for a while with which details I would like to capture each day to plan and record my day, and here's where I have landed:

1. I need to know how much of my day is going to be spent in meetings vs doing - so I track my meetings for the day. Ideally I would sync this to my calendar, but I haven't done this yet.
2. I need to prioritise my tasks. I'm using the time management analogy "rocks, pebbles and sand" to ensure the important tasks are surfaced to the top.
3. I have some honest questions in there - I don't answer them every day, but I do think about them. For example, "What is keeping me at night?". It may be work related or personal, but it's something I may want to solve within today's schedule.
4. Finally I have some start of day and end of day tasks such as checking email, Slack and reviewing the teams progress and any new bugs identified. You can find new bugs in JIRA with the JQL query issuetype = Bug AND created >= -1d ORDER BY created DESC.

So without further ado, here is my Markdown template!

## Start of Day

* [ ] Check email
* [ ] Check Slack
* [ ] Review JIRA task board
* [ ] Review new JIRA bugs

## Thoughts

**What's keeping me up at night?**


**What do I feel stuck on?**


**What am I avoiding?**


**What's making me uncomfortable?**


## Today's Meetings

**Meetings duration: x hrs**
* [ ] 9:45 - 10:00 - Engineering Stand Up

## Today will be successful if...

?

## Today's Tasks

**≤ 1 Big Task**
* [ ] Task 1

**≤ 2 Medium Tasks**
* [ ] Task 1
* [ ] Task 2

**≤ 3 Small Tasks**
* [ ] Task 1
* [ ] Task 2
* [ ] Task 3

## End of Day

* [ ] Add tags to daily note
* [ ] Check email
* [ ] Clean up inbox
* [ ] Check tomorrow's calendar
* [ ] Clean up desktop, downloads

## Notes

#dailynote #jan2024 #year2024

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By Andi Smith