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Automating the Daily Dump Note

In work and personal life I’ve long been an automator. It started in the ’90s, but actually started when I was a kid and talking with my dad about systems, making them more efficient, and removing steps, and automations. Any manual rote step I look at and think about making it a click or “just run”. I’ve used Obsidian since June 2020 and have a lot of things in my markdown notes trigged by TextExpander.

Reducing Steps Setting my My Daily Dump Note

Little by little I’ve been building out some automations for my note taking that sits under Obsidian’s watchful eye, but may start elsewhere or seeds start elsewhere. In the morning I run some automations that sweep up videos of interest I forwarded to myself from the prior evening or that morning that are in a personal instance of Slack. I have one that pulls in notes in Drafts with a specific tag then archives the note. One last piece I’d really like to add is to have my known items from across my calendars dropped in at the top of that Daily Dump note.

Getting the calendar dump is something I’d really like to have before I get to my laptop in the morning. But, each of these automations could and should be automated and dropped in the note before I fully get to it as well.

This takes one thing… having the note.

Creating the note with the series of headers and subheadings is something I usually do in a new markdown note with TextExpander each morning. But, I can’t automate with TextExpander (or I haven’t sorted out how to trigger that from a far).

Automating but Not with Apple Shortcuts

I started a couple days ago thinking that since I had Actions for Obsidian I could easily create a new Daily Dump with the correct future date as a title and have it trigger the Templater template for the note with the correct date. I quickly got the file created properly, but in over 4 hours that included a couple hours the following day it was still not working properly. This also included a few different apps and pieces and if any of them change it breaks.

Since I not only wanted to create one note with a template for the next day, but to have a few days ahead created (say a week at a time). I gave up on Shortcuts and in under 20 minutes I had a python script doing exactly what I wanted. This included setting up a cronjob to run it on Sunday evening and have a week of notes set.

Using the Output

This morning I opened Obsidian and one of the future day’s notes I had setup as tests was a click away and I was capturing an idea. This is a nice change and one I wished I had done long ago.

The next step is automating bringing in the aggregation automations notes and dropping that into my Daily Dump.