{"slug": "use-date-trees-to-organize-chronological-notes-in-obsidian", "title": "Use date trees to organize chronological notes in Obsidian", "summary": "Developer s3thi released Date Trees, an Obsidian plugin that organizes journal entries and daily notes into a year/month folder hierarchy, available now in the Obsidian plugin directory. The plugin was built almost entirely with coding agents, and s3thi said he reviewed every line of generated code and takes responsibility for the work but does not feel comfortable taking credit for something largely built by a machine. The author has accumulated nearly a thousand Markdown files since starting digital journaling in 2014, using ISO 8601 filenames such as 2026-09-21.md to keep entries sorted chronologically.", "body_md": "# \n[Use date trees to organize chronological notes in Obsidian](https://ankursethi.com/blog/use-date-trees-to-organize-chronological-notes-in-obsidian/)\n\nI recently built [Date Trees](https://github.com/s3thi/date-trees), an Obsidian plugin to help me better organize my journal entries and daily notes. You can [download it from the Obsidian plugin directory](https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/date-trees), or read the rest of this post to understand why I built it.\n\nI built this plugin almost entirely using coding agents. I reviewed every line of generated code, and often rewrote parts of it when it wasn't up to snuff. I also added an excess of comments to the code to ensure I understood it completely (a post for another day). I'm comfortable taking responsibility for this work.\n\nHowever, I'm including this disclaimer here because I don't feel comfortable taking credit for something that was largely built by a machine.\n\nTaking responsibility but not credit. What does that say about our current moment in tech?\n\nI've enjoyed journaling for as long as I can remember. In high school and college, I wrote in spiral-bound notebooks with cheap blue ballpoint pens. Eventually, as a young adult, I switched to writing in plain Markdown files on my computer.\n\nThese days I begin most mornings with a fresh cup of coffee and a Markdown file whose filename is the day's date in ISO 8601 format (e.g. `2026-09-21.md`). I then shut off all distractions and write about a thousand words, or until my mind is empty of thought. I started this practice in 2014, journaling intermittently whenever I felt like it. In recent years, it's a rare day when I miss my morning journaling hour.\n\nIn the twelve years since I started journaling digitally, I've accumulated nearly a thousand Markdown files (I [counted](https://ankursethi.com/tils/recursively-counting-the-number-of-markdown-files-in-a-directory/)). The ISO 8601 format for filenames ensures all files are automatically sorted in chronological order when I view the folder in my file manager or the Obsidian sidebar (as long as my sort order is set to filename). Like this:\n\n```\n- Journal/\n  - 2014-03-13.md\n  - 2014-03-14.md\n  - 2014-03-15.md\n  - 2014-03-16.md\n  - ...\n  - 2026-04-01.md\n  - 2026-04-02.md\n  - 2026-04-03.md\n  - 2026-04-04.md\n```\n\nBut, as you can imagine, navigating a folder with a thousand files (and counting) is not easy, even when they're sorted chronologically. There's no hierarchy of any kind to help me digest the collection in smaller chunks.\n\nIt's easy enough to pull up an entry for a specific date—you just type the date into a search box—but casually browsing through the archive or navigating quickly to a specific month in a specific year using a pointing device is not a comfortable experience. A giant list of files is also difficult to navigate on mobile.\n\nTo make these entries easier to navigate, I eventually reorganized my journal so the files were tucked into folders and subfolders using a sensible hierarchy. Something like this:\n\n```\n- Journal/\n  - 2024/\n  - 2025/\n  - 2026/\n    - 01/\n    - 02/\n    - 03/\n    - 04/\n      - 2026-04-01.md\n      - 2026-04-02.md\n      - 2026-04-03.md\n      - 2026-04-04.md\n```\n\nWith this hierarchy in place, if I wanted to figure out what I was doing on 21 September 2016, I could go to the folder for the year 2016, then the ninth month, and then scan the relatively small number of files for the correct date. And the notes still automatically sorted themselves into chronological order at each level of the hierarchy. Much better!\n\nThis is how I organized my journal, daily notes, and other chronological notes for several years. Until I discovered something better.\n\nMany moons ago, during my brief time using Org Mode to make sense of my life, I came across the idea of a *date tree*. From the [Org Mode documentation](https://orgmode.org/manual/Template-elements.html#FOOT86):\n\nYou generally use date trees *within* Org files to organize your notes into chronological sections. The package includes shortcuts to help you create these hierarchies, move them around, visualize them on a calendar, quickly capture notes into them, and generally slice-and-dice them in an Emacsian manner.\n\nI didn't care about organizing individual files as date trees. My Markdown files rarely contained notes for more than a single day. But I realized I could use date trees to organize a folder structure. This is what it looks like:\n\n```\n- Journal/\n  - 2024/\n  - 2025/\n  - 2026/\n    - 01 January/\n    - 02 February/\n    - 03 March/\n    - 04 April/\n      - 2026-04-01 Wednesday.md\n      - 2026-04-02 Thursday.md\n      - 2026-04-03 Friday.md\n      - 2026-04-04 Saturday.md\n```\n\nThis has all the benefits of my previous system: an obvious hierarchy and automatic chronological sorting in most file managers and notes apps. But adding month and weekday names to folder and file names makes navigation even easier. This organization strategy doesn't require me to constantly map month names to month numbers and back, which usually takes me a bit of cognitive effort. Further, having the name of the weekday in the filename makes it easy for me to \"see\" full weeks in my file manager, and also helps me guess at the contents of the file.\n\nDate trees are now my default method for organizing chronological notes and other files across my computer. Depending on the volume of files I need to store, I can omit one or more levels of the hierarchy. And, as an additional bonus, it's easy to write scripts to parse these folder structures in order to process or automatically reorganize them. Which is exactly what my plugin does.\n\nOf course, you can create these date tree structures manually in your file manager or notes app. But if you use Obsidian, my plugin makes the process a little easier. It lets you right-click folders in your vault to mark them as date trees.\n\nYou can then use the command palette to quickly create new daily notes or open existing ones.\n\nThe plugin also lets you assign a template to each date tree (though the template implementation is an ugly hack at the moment). In the future, I'm planning to add the ability to navigate backward and forward chronologically within a date tree, and to open every historical entry from the same calendar date.\n\nI've been using this plugin for three months. By now I have several date trees set up in my vault, including:\n\n- My personal journal (the initial use case)\n- Daily notes\n- Devlogs for programming projects\n- Therapy notes\n- Ongoing notes for long-form writing projects\n\nIf you are one of the seven people in the world who care about folder structures as much as I do, please [try out my plugin](https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/date-trees). If you'd like to give me feedback, file bug reports, or contribute new features, you can do so on the [project's GitHub page](https://github.com/s3thi/date-trees). You can also [write to me via email](mailto:contact@ankursethi.com?subject=Date%20Trees).\n\nI hope Date Trees can help you tame your own ballooning notes folder.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/use-date-trees-to-organize-chronological-notes-in-obsidian", "canonical_source": "https://ankursethi.com/blog/use-date-trees-to-organize-chronological-notes-in-obsidian/", "published_at": "2026-09-21 11:08:13+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-21 11:26:30.783206+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-agents", "ai-tools", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["Obsidian", "Date Trees", "s3thi", "Org Mode", "GitHub"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/use-date-trees-to-organize-chronological-notes-in-obsidian", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/use-date-trees-to-organize-chronological-notes-in-obsidian.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/use-date-trees-to-organize-chronological-notes-in-obsidian.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/use-date-trees-to-organize-chronological-notes-in-obsidian.jsonld"}}