Pros and cons of "additive" daily pages

jeffhanley

I would love to learn from other users the pros and cons of the additive concept of daily pages. I don't work in the forever timeframe but I can look ahead 5 or 10 years to a situation where 5 or 10 years of journaling on 12 July would be a little unwieldy. Why do this rather than having discrete pages for 12 July '25 and 12 July '26, etc. Has anyone been doing this journaling concept long enough to encounter a daily journal note that is too long to be useful? For example, does the collapsible heading function make this a moot point? Your thoughts and experiences, please.

RogerWorden

I'm just now trying out FN, so no experience but some thoughts.

Pro: Less clutter; max out at 365 daily notes instead of thousands over time.
Pro: No obvious way to link to automatically all notes of a month. Smart Folders can find them by tag/date, but I don't see how to put a link to a Smart Folder into a monthly not, hence:
Con: One-time labor of setting up 365 links in monthly notes.
Con: daily labor of creating a Year header in each daily note.
Con: One-time labor of combining my existing discrete daily notes.
Pro: I could eliminate a Shortcut that creates a daily note for me each day.
Neutral: I usually search by tags or text because I don't remember exactly what date something happened.
Pro?: If I know what date I need to go to, it's usually in the current year, so no extra work to click thru the monthly note… might be quicker than searching or scrolling.

jeffhanley

TY Roger. Great insights. I think the collapsible headings for each year could work. Still getting my head into the F✱N paradigm. :-) Matthias has "broken the mold" here.

tr4jan

Great topic to discuss, @jeffhanley.

There are components of the F✱N approach that I keep naming, because in my opinion they do not (or cannot) provide any added value over dedicated software solutions. This includes "the journal". For simple domestic use perhaps, but bending a notes app beyond recognition by its intended use feels just funny to me again and again. Whereby I admittedly enjoy to witness peoples creativity with shortcuts aso.

I hope you get some examples, while my experience is that most of the foristi prefer to enjoy their own tweaked “Frankenstein-F✱N” in silence/ darkness. 😂