Hi there! I wanted to mark an important milestone in my note-taking and journaling journeys. After 11 years with DayOne and 2 years with Logseq, I pulled the trigger and went all in with Obsidian.

I immediately liked the speed and snappiness of Obsidian - it works really fast and it’s responsive. It’s a pleasure to write and jump from one note to the other. After the installation, the setup looked pretty basic, so I took a deep breath and spent a few hours investigating interesting plugins and other people’s setups. I will mention a few changes that made the biggest impact and made Obsidian feel like home.

TL;DR#

Just in case you don’t want to read the whole thing, here are some screenshots of my setup:

High-level overview of what I'm looking at usually.
Here's how daily note look like in 'production'.

Font#

I love monospaced fonts, but I don’t have a clear winner in terms of fonts. There are many great monotype fonts like Fira Code, Cascadia Code, or Monaspace. I played with all of them in Obsidian, and after a few days of experimenting, I stuck to JetBrains Mono. It’s brilliant!

Theme#

I’m a big Dracula fan and use it all around the place; however, it didn’t click with me in Obsidian. Thankfully, I found an inspiration from CyanVoxel in one of his videos!

Daily templates#

Daily notes are first-class citizens in Obsidian, and it was something that I used in Logseq the most, so making them work for me was the first goal. Here are the setups/links that inspired me the most:

Initially, I went with Calendar and Templater and worked a few days with them. I didn’t like the navigation between daily notes, though, so after finding Journals for Obsidian, I looked no further. All I had to do was to add calendar-nav to my template and I was good to go!

The most important bit for me was a way to look back at what happened in the past, a feature from DayOne that I enjoyed immensely. I didn’t know a lot about fetching the data and using DataView, but thanks to other people sharing their stuff, I was able to quickly build something adjusted for my needs.

If you want to take a look, here is the daily template. For now, it has everything I need. In the upcoming weeks, I might put some effort into writing weekly/monthly/yearly notes. Right now, I’m focusing on building the daily habit and journaling a bit every day.

The best part of the day is going through old notes!

Importing from Logseq#

Importing data was quite easy. I just moved the folder. 🤷‍♂️ There are some clever importers, but I did that manually except for journals. I had my data stored in a year-based hierarchy, but I wanted to adjust that slightly, so I built a bash script to sort files accordingly. And that was it. My notes were very simple, linking stuff, some tags here and there, so I didn’t have to bother that much.

Importing from DayOne#

A few thousand journal entries from DayOne were a bigger challenge. I tried a few solutions/importers available on GitHub, ended up modifying this one: LucyDYu/dayone-to-obsidian the most, and extending it with some bash goodness to make things work.

The biggest headache was the output format and the front matter. I decided to make it compatible with the Journals plugin to save some time. I saved the first sentence of the journal entry as the DailySummary:: section, and thanks to that, I have a nice-looking “On that day” part of my daily journal.

My importer is a messy thing not worth pushing to GitHub, but if by any chance you see the possibility that it might benefit your own migration process, just ping me.

Don’t do everything at once#

That’s that, expect for the fact that I also went Johnny.Decimal in the same time. I was struggling between discovering Obsidian and migrating the old tools to a yet not discovered environment. Sometimes I like to mess my routine, usually after a slower and poor period I get my anticipated productivity hit. I felt it pretty quickly this time.

Still todo#

  • find a way how to work with tasks
  • sort files automatically based on properties (like move notes tagged #book to a certain location and add even more properties to that note)
  • integrate Obsidian data structure with contents of my blog - I want to write/edit notes here and sync it with my blog’s repository so I can build and publish stuff there, but have just one source of truth.
  • add sync with read-it-later service1

If you have any questions, or suggestions on how to improve my setup, feel free to reach out! What I did was a quick and dirty migration, and I’m sure there are many things that could be done better.

It was fun, it always is! Solid 3/10 for the migration process :D I’m happy to join the Obsidian community!

  1. As Omnivore is shutting down soon (end of Nov'24), this is going to be a bit more complicated than I thought, because I need to find an appealing read-it-later service first! ↩︎