Bernie Goldbach

Using a bloated daily checklist. My choice.

· Bernie Goldbach

A detailed digital planner or task management interface forms part of my Obsidian to-do list. It has sections forcompleted, pending, and prioritized tasks alongside a sidebar containing folders and navigation links.

I’ve been exchanging audio notes with Simon Toon about using Obsidian. Today I offer a look at the checklist nature of my Obsidian Daily Note. You can see part of it in the screenshot.

Listen to “My bloated daily checkist E730” on Spreaker.

I’m thinking of checklists because I’m exchanging audio notes with Simon in the UK, who’s also going down a pathway of using daily notes in Obsidian as a tick-off way of staying focused on projects and activities.

My daily note is too complex to describe in one go. So I’ll just mention one are inside of it that’s powered by a template and a section of the daily note that’s called First Light.

I’m using Nick Milo’s Ideaverse Pro to start with a clean Daily Note. I modified it significantly, starting with the heading called “First Light”.

I start First Light in morning when I get up, tap the Obsidian Daily Note widge and start doing things like Swarm, an app to help me remember where I have to go that day. I have another checklist item that’s called Whoop, which is my fitness tracker. I log the score Whoop gives me for quality of sleep. I got a 72 Whoop last night. Then my next tick off is called Review the Calendar for Lingering Calls. I also have an item called “percent previously productive”. Claude has a program routine that evaluates the percentage of items ticked off during the previous day’s checklist. Then I review the Claude Daily Brief.

So those are the first five five tick-offs from Swarm to Whoop to review the calendar, percent completed previously, and then review Claude Daily Brief.

I also prep Happy Notes for specific audiences that I call “FOAF people”, friends of a friend’s people.

I then look at mentions and comments that are coming through blog comments or coming through the Fediverse.

I look at a page called Ideas.

I look at two different places of my Inoreader called AI2 and another one called TUSMail.

I look at a service called Leaflet Pubs to see what’s trending.

I look at my Fabric AI to see what I’ve put up as bookmarks.

I run an analysis of web stats through a Plausible Analytics.

I finally look at my Google account and YouTube activity.

That’s my first light.

Reckon there are too many things to do? Remember, I am trying to be more productive at first light.