A few years ago I shared Matthew Dicks’ idea of “Homework for Life” and I’ve tried to do it most days (though I’m generally about 50/50). The idea is pretty simple; every day, just jot down a single line of a story from the day. Matthew is great about doing it every day, and as I look back at my own I’m sad to see all of the gaps in there.
Ryan Holiday has a very similar practice called “One Line a Day”, and he’s not missed a day in nearly a decade, as he explains here. What’s neat about Holiday’s practice is that he uses a paper “One Line a Day” journal. That particular journal has five entries for every day of the year, so you write one entry per year, but use the journal for five straight years. As you get to the same day again, you can see your past entries. It’s a great idea!
How to revisit the past
I know that Matthew used to just keep his “Homework for Life” in a simple Excel spreadsheet, but now he has an app that he uses instead. In both cases, these guys now have an easy way to review the past somewhat automatically.
Since I save all of mine in Obsidian, I thought there must be some way to automatically pull old entries onto my “daily note”, and after a lot of back-and-forth with ChatGPT, we figured out how to get it done. Now as I create my daily notes, it automatically shows any old “Homework for Life” from that same day in past years as seen at the bottom of this screenshot:
This is where my disappointment in my past self comes in. I’ve only been doing this for a few years and I’ve missed a lot of days, so many days the “Historical HFL” is completely blank. I figure that alone will inspire me to do better, so as time goes on this should be increasingly useful.
My inspiration for this came mostly from Holiday’s recent post, so I encourage you to check it out to see his perspective on things.
This is arguably one of the places in my daily routine where I spend too much time. Every single day (pretty much without a miss for at least 20 years) I note highlights for the day. This is probably at least 90% personal stuff, and the good stuff, but I also note some current events, and I keep track of birthdays and anniversaries the same place. My system has evolved over the years, and I’ve changed tools, but the basics are simple. I have one “page” per day for each day of the year. Within that, I list the years, and for each of those years the events that matter. I’m more than willing to record wha I consider significant that happened outside my lifetime. (probably part of why I feel connected with some historical things that were long before I was born. Each morning I update the page from yesterday, then I review the page for today. For instance, here’s a tiny clip from today’s page:
1862 – USS Monitor launched, Greenpoint, Long Island
1909 – Saul Alinsky birth date (Rules for Radicals). Died 6/12/1972, age 63
1912 – Theologian Francis Schaeffer birth date. Died 5/15/1984, age 72
1925 – Douglas Engelbart birth date (Mouse inventor). Died 7/2/2013, age 88
This is also my system for “remembering” birthdays and anniversaries. I don’t remember much at all! I just have a record of it.
Whoa, that’s really cool! I love that! I may want to build mine out a bit more.
How did you do this in obsidian?
Each one is a separate note, tucked into a folder titled “hfl”. notes have a tag field (always “HFL” for these) and a date field.
Then I set up a base for it that pulls them all in (“where folder = hfl”)
I set up a historical “view” in that base that does two things:
folder contains “hfl”
and
date.month == date(this.file.name).month &&
date.day == date(this.file.name).day
Then in my daily note I just have this:
![[HFL.base#Historical]]
I made that part of my daily note template so it always pulls in. It works well!