Obsidian Journal across Vaults
Personally, Obsidian became my go-to tool for most aspects of organizing myself both privately and professionally. From general note-taking, knowledge management, meeting notes, task management, goal management, journaling, to even writing blog posts like this one. If you look at the large Obsidian community, the plugin ecosystem, and the many articles in this area, it needs no further selling. And we are not even starting on the personal and privacy-related aspects yet…
A key aspect of personal organization in Obsidian, in my view, is keeping journals . This includes not only maintaining daily notes but also rolling up to weekly and monthly notes to track personal goals throughout the year. I strongly recommend watching the linked YouTube video if you are interested in this process.
YouTube: Daily Note Rollup
One key aspect missing from this (as with many sample setups in the Obsidian community) is how something fundamental like this can work across different vaults. Admittedly, for most Obsidian users, one vault is probably sufficient, and handling multiple vaults on a day-to-day basis is not a common use case.
However, personally, I work with two vaults: one for my private life and one for my professional life . The main reason is that I process a lot of sensitive data that should not leave my work laptop, and all files should be backed up and handled by my employer’s IT services (OneDrive, etc.). This also means that I am not only working with multiple vaults but also with multiple devices on a daily basis: my work and personal laptops, my mobile device, and my home server.
This is where it becomes tricky: writing journals and daily notes should still be central . There is no point in planning and reviewing your day depending on which vault or device you are using. So how do I approach this topic? I use a setup similar to this:
First of all, I am using Syncthing for cross-device synchronization. It runs almost everywhere, is super easy to set up, and privacy-wise has many advantages since no cloud services or others are involved. Therefore, I am continuously syncing my private vault, including journals, to my home server. From there, you can freely configure which (sub-)folders of the vault should be synced to other vaults on different devices. This enables us to sync the Journal folder used for daily notes and their roll-up also in the work vault.
This has several key advantages for daily productivity:
- You set up and use the same daily note/day plan regardless of whether you’re planning and reviewing private or professional aspects of your day.
- The daily note can present different contexts depending on which vault it is opened in. For example, I strongly use the Tasks plugin, which presents me with the todos I need to execute daily. If I am in my private vault, it shows private tasks; if I am in my work vault, it shows professional tasks. If there are dependencies for my day plan, I can still include them in the day note content itself.
You can find my daily note template here .
A key thing to consider, though, is that the daily note or journal configuration needs to be the same in both vaults and that the configuration needs to be synced or at least transferred manually to ensure that the same journaling logic applies…