This title isn’t meant to be clickbait; it is intended to be transparent. After using Notion for over a year, I think it is a perfectly good choice for a daily journal. However, it made sense for me to move to Obsidian because Notion was starting to become slow and because Obsidian was the home of my Personal Knowledge Management system.
The appeal of Notion for journaling
I started exploring the personal productivity and knowledge management space in the Spring of 2021 after watching videos on YouTube, which led me to download and try Notion.
While Notion has a steep learning curve for beginners, I liked the idea of using its blocks, like Lego, to define your own systems.
Around the same time, I read a couple of books which promoted the concept of keeping a daily journal. This topic should be the subject of another post, but it seemed to make sense to incorporate it into Notion.
How I set up my Daily Journal in Notion
Notion’s greatest strength and weakness is its design, which gives all its components a structure. You must consider this when you are trying to do something without an apparent structure.
To circumvent this, I created a simple Notion data table, which is a database that sounds more complex than it is. The only data stored within the table is the page title and the date it was created. Since I was using a Notion database, I could make a simple template useful for habit tracking.
How I kept my daily journal in Notion
I started a new journal in Notion and captured any early morning thoughts each morning. I also would look to update the journal at the end of the day before I went to sleep. Notion supports the concepts of backlinks, and I would use them to link to other pages in my Notion workspace.
Since I last used Notion, my journaling practice has changed quite a bit. However, I will include a screenshot of the template I was using.
Why I moved my Daily Journal to Obsidian
I’m including this section to be transparent, and I think it will also help you decide if Notion is right for you. Journaling, like any aspect of self-development, is all about learning how you work and finding the systems that work best for you.
A few months after I started journaling, I tried Obsidian for a second time. As a personal knowledge management system, it seemed to work better for me than Notion. As I was still a newcomer to Personal Knowledge Management, it wasn’t too difficult to switch to Obsidian.
About 12 months later, I started to think about moving my journal across to Obsidian, as it is an excellent tool for writing.
Due to Obsidian minimal design, it is really easy to focus on your writing, which is why the original draft of this post was written in Obsidian.
I was put off by the fact that Obsidian stores your files locally, and I was still practising starting my journal in the morning. I would need a way to sync my Obsidian notes between devices. So I could have access to my journal from my tablet. I couldn’t justify the expense until Notion started slowing down and became frustrating to use. So, I piloted keeping a journal on Obsidian first, only on my desktop. The pilot was a success, and I subscribed to Obsidian Sync.
Conclusion
The point of this post is not that you should not use Notion or Obsidian as a daily journal. It is about finding the one that is right for you, and as it did for me, it might change over time as your needs change.
If you mainly use Notion for your productivity and knowledge management, go for Notion, and it will do a good job. Use Obsidian more like me, and then go for Obsidian.