How to Make a Simple Health Log in Obsidian — Plugins Optional

Good news: simple themed logs work in any notes app!

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Some people (Eleanor Konik is one) use logs for specific topics like gardening and health, rather than dumping everything into a daily note and tagging entries for later retrieval. In fact, some people don’t use daily notes at all! I admit I find that quite confronting.

How can you not use some kind of daily note, I wondered? Doesn’t it increase your cognitive load to have to think of where to put things before you start writing?

Apparently not, for people whose brains are wired that way. You can read more about Eleanor’s approach in this post — which was, by the way, the article that convinced me to sign up as a paid supporter of her site.

Use themed logs when you need them, not before

There’s something invitingly analog about the themed-log approach, but daily notes were (and are) a big part of how I like to work, so I figured it wasn’t for me. I thought I had to choose either the simplicity of the daily note catchall or keeping themed logs, but then I realised that I can have both!

So far I have two logs: one to view summaries of each week, and another to track things related to my health. In the latter I write about symptoms and treatments, and keep a running record of my weight and body measurements.

The health log appears in my list of starred files in Obsidian, but I find it’s easier to press ⌘O and start typing “log h” to bring it up. It’s named Log — Health to make it easy to search for, and so that any logs I create in future will sit together in an alphabetically-sorted list.

How it works

In its simplest form, my health log is nothing more than a series of dated entries containing anything that strikes me as significant.

My log for February of this year is a bit TMI, but real-life examples often help more than words when learning something new, so here it is.