Daily Notes: One Solution

Here’s one approach to doing Daily Notes In Tinderbox.

To begin, we have three prototype notes: Year, Month, and Day. I’ve chosen some styles for these that look nice in outline view.

All our journal notes reside in a container called Journal. That container expects to contain instances of Year. When you create a new note inside Journal, it’s automatically named for the year that follows the previous Year note. If there’s no previous Year note, we name it for this year.

Each Year expects to contain Month notes. Each month note has a StartDate of the first day of that month. We get the year from the name of the parent. The month is the month that follows the StartDate of the previous sibling. If there's no previous sibling, it’s January. If it turns out that the $StartDate is no longer in the expected year — if we’ve added a note beneath December 31 — then this note isn’t a month at all and doesn’t inherit from the Month prototype.

Each Month expects to contain Day notes. These work much as months; we get the year from the grandparent and the month from the parent. Our day of the month is the day after the day of our elder sibling; if we have no elder sibling, we’re the first of the month. If it turns out that the $StartDate is no longer in the expected month — if we’ve added a note beneath June 30 — then this note isn’t a day at all and doesn’t inherit from the Day prototype.

If we want some writing prompts or reminders to be added for each new Day, we simply write the template text in /Prototypes/Day.

You can download the sample Tinderbox file.