The Five Minute Journal with Dendron and Visual Studio Code

Journal sitting up against a laptop

It's 2022 and you're looking to start off the year right by keeping a journal. Where to start? The Five Minute Journal (5MJ)1 is a simple but effective way to get started with note taking.

The Five Minute Journal

Tim Ferriss,2 world-famous entrepreneur and author of books such as Tribe of Mentors,3 uploaded a video in 2020 all about his approach to note taking with physical notebooks.4 5MJ helps him express gratitude, make days better, and focus on mindfulness.

In this post, we'll be going over how to create your own 5MJ using Dendron. Dendron is a structured note taking tool for developers that is open source, local first, and integrated with Visual Studio Code (VS Code).

Prerequisites

This post expects that you've gone through the Dendron Getting Started Guide and have a workspace opened to work with. If you're new to Dendron, make sure to take a look.

Concepts

Daily journal notes

Daily journal notes are special notes meant to easily track your everyday life. Dendron also has a built-in Calendar View that helps you visually navigate and create new journal entries.

Templates

Templates are notes with pre-outlined content meant for reuse. Templates can either be inserted into an open note with the Dendron: Apply Template command, or automatically applied at note creation with Schemas. These are meant to reduce friction in the creation of new content, providing standardized outlines to your notes.

Schemas

As you end up creating more notes, it can be hard to keep track of them all. This is why Dendron has schemas to help you manage your notes at scale. Think of schemas as an optional type system for your notes. They describe the hierarchy of your data and are themselves, represented as a hierarchy.

Steps

Create 5MJ template

Open lookup (Ctrl+L / Cmd+L)
Type templates.daily-5mj in the text prompt and hit enter to create the template
Copy and paste the following markdown:

<!--
Based on the journaling method created by Intelligent Change:
- [Intelligent Change: Our Story](https://www.intelligentchange.com/pages/our-story)
- [The Five Minute Journal](https://www.intelligentchange.com/products/the-five-minute-journal)
-->

## Morning

<!-- Fill out this section after waking up -->

### Gratitude

I am grateful for:

1.
2.
3.

### What would make today great?

1.
2.
3.

### Daily affirmations

I am...

## Evening

<!-- Fill out this section before going to sleep, reflecting on your day -->

### Amazing things that happened today

1.
2.
3.

### How could I have made today even better?

I could have made today better by

Save the file.

You now have a new template with the 5MJ outline.

Create 5MJ schema

Templates can be used with or without schemas. Run Insert Note to insert a template into a currently opened note.

Open schema lookup (Ctrl+Shift+L / Cmd+Shift+L)
Type 5mj in the text prompt and hit enter to create the schema, which should look like the following:

version: 1
imports: []
schemas:
  - id: 5mj
    children: []
    title: 5mj
    parent: root

Update 5MJ schema contents

We are going to use Inline Schema, a simpler schema format that takes less lines and uses indentation for visual understanding.

Replace the content of 5mj.schema.yml with the following:

version: 1
schemas:
# Daily is the top most schema since its parent is 'root' it must have an identifier
# this identifier 'daily' will be used when using 'Lookup (schema)' command.
- id: daily
  parent: root
  title: daily
  desc: ""
  # Children of the top most schema do not need to contain identifier and just 
  # require a 'pattern' to be set to match the hierarchy of notes.
  children:
    - pattern: journal
      children:
          # This pattern matches the YYYY (year) child hierarchy
        - pattern: "[0-2][0-9][0-9][0-9]"
          children:
              # This pattern matches the MM (month) child hierarchy
            - pattern: "[0-1][0-9]"
              children:
                  # This pattern matches the DD (day) child hierarchy
                - pattern: "[0-3][0-9]"
                  # As with regular schema we can set the template to be used with
                  # the match of our notes. Below is an example usage of shorthand template
                  # definition (which defaults to type: note). 
                  desc: Five Minute Journal
                  template: templates.daily-5mj

The pattern attribute is using a Glob Pattern, which is an expression used to match ranges and combinations of characters.

To match with the daily journal structure:

Example: daily.journal.2021.12.31
Patterns:
- Year: [0-2][0-9][0-9][0-9] means match the range 0000 - 2999
- Month: [0-1][0-9] means match the range 00 - 19
- Day: [0-3][0-9] means match the range 00 - 39

This means all new daily journal notes are within pattern ranges.

Create a new daily journal

Creating a daily journal entry results in the templates.daily-5mj template automatically inserted.

Run Create Daily Journal Note (Ctrl+Shift+I / Cmd+Shift+I)

You should see a new daily journal note with the 5MJ template inserted.

Create 5MJ Daily Journal from Schema and Template

Congratulations!

Key takeaways

After doing this, you've now:

Created a 5MJ template
Created a 5MJ schema
Created your first daily journal with the 5MJ template applied via schema

Next steps

Now what? You have daily journals using templates, but Dendron can do much more. It's an open source, local-first knowledge management solution that scales as you do.

Learn to swiftly create schema by targeting existing note hierarchies
Learn to level-up your daily life with the bullet journaling workflow
Learn to explore your schema visually using the schema graph
Check out an end-to-end workstyle, managing 20k notes, using schemas and daily journals from A Day in Dendron
Dendron FAQ
Dendron Concepts

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Footnotes

The Five Minute Journal, by Intelligent Change ˄
It's hard to use one sentence to describe all the things Tim Ferris does. He has one of the most popular podcasts in the world, and has authored several books from all of his notes and interview content. He seems shorter in person. Anyway, learn more at his website!˄
For a list of books, see Books by Tim Ferriss.˄
The video: How I Journal and Take Notes: Brainstorming + Focusing + Reducing Anxiety. For a companion guide to the video, take a look at How Tim Ferriss Uses The Five Minute Journal: 6 Tips For New Journalers.˄