Daily Notes is one of the most powerful features in Craft. They work just like any other Craft doc but they’re tied to calendar dates so they’re a convenient way to track tasks, notes and progress over time. Maybe you want to track daily or weekly habits or keep your team up to date with your latest projects — Daily Notes are a super convenient way to do it.
To help you make the most of Daily Notes, here are a few of the most common ways people use them:
1. Team alignment
At Craft, we use Daily Notes as a way to make sure the entire team is aligned. Writing structured daily updates provides an opportunity to align on priorities and highlight blockers so you can help and keep a project moving.
Each member of the team shares a daily update in a public space to record their achievements, obstacles, and learnings throughout the day.
In a Daily Note, you can mention other team members to ask for their input or draw their attention to an important update. This transparent way of working means challenges are resolved in real-time and information is disseminated across teams organically.
We make a habit of reviewing these notes every morning which provides everyone with context for their own workday plus visibility of what’s going on in the rest of the company too.
2. Scratchpad
If you’re anything like me, you probably take tons of random notes throughout the day. Perhaps you’re capturing an idea you had on your way to work or maybe you read something that resonated so you jotted down some thoughts.
In the past, these ideas might have been scrawled on post-it notes or scrap paper, only to be lost or thrown away before you could write them down somewhere more permanent. With Daily Notes you get a place to quickly write down things that come to mind without the additional cognitive load of deciding what the note should be called or where to save it. Each new day brings with it a fresh new scratchpad, while your old ideas get archived. The beauty of it is you can easily access your older notes by scrolling through the calendar or searching in Craft.
3. Meeting notes
Meetings play a critical role in driving alignment, fostering collaboration, and facilitating decision-making within a team. But, they’re only really valuable if they're effective. To make sure that meetings are productive, they should have a clear agenda and intention, a practice of recording the key points discussed, and a commitment to tracking and completing any action points.
This is where meeting notes come in. Some companies already have a formal process for taking meeting minutes and a dedicated scribe who's responsible for taking them. Even if your company doesn’t, it's good practice to keep a private set of notes for each meeting as a record of the key points that resonated with you and any action points you have from the meeting.
Craft’s Daily Notes are a fantastic way to keep meeting notes. They’re already associated with the day’s date and they can easily be broken into the day’s various meetings by giving each day its own sub-page. In fact, if you’re using an Apple device, you can connect your Calendar to Craft and automatically pull in your calendar events. Then it just takes one click to create a blank Craft doc for each meeting.
4. Journal
Journaling is an increasingly popular activity that’s been shown to promote self-awareness, improve mental health, and stimulate personal growth. By writing a little every day about your thoughts and experiences, it can help you process them and make sense of them.
A number of folks in the Craft community have found Craft’s Daily Notes to be a useful place for keeping a daily journal. Some people prefer to use journal prompts to inspire their journaling whereas others prefer free-flow journaling where you simply write whatever's on your mind for a specific period of time.
Daily Notes provide the journaling framework and offer an easy way to write something every day.
Overall, Daily Notes are a simple yet powerful part of Craft and they’re flexible enough to be used in lots of different ways. Is there a workflow that we’ve missed? If you use Daily Notes in an interesting way, let us know in the community.
