I’ve always wanted a plain text calendar system in Obsidian, avoiding proprietary software for managing events. Fancy calendar techniques like time blocking have never appealed to me; I simply need a system that clearly tells me what’s happening when.
While some plugins sync Google Calendar or iCal with Obsidian, they have drawbacks. Other plugins are exclusive to Obsidian and don’t always offer readable or usable plain text formats.
For over 2 years now, I have been using a bullet journal like setup in Obsidian where I manually migrate important dates for each month from my yearly view note.
However, I’ve discovered a simple solution using just daily notes and the Calendar Widget plugin in Obsidian. By following these steps, you can easily create event and be reminded of them as soon as you trigger the daily note for the day, without the need for complex plugins while keeping all your notes in plain text format.
Here’s how you can do it:
Create a “Yearly View” note:
This note will contain a list of dates along with corresponding events or tasks. (yes a simple list of dates and the corresponding event)
You can organize it month-wise or in any other way you prefer. For example:
May 10 — Event 1
May 24 — Event 2
Jun 04 — Event 3
Sep 07 — Event 4
You can leave out the year if it’s a yearly recurring event. If you want to note the year, you can do it like this:
May 10 — Event 1 (2024)
Here’s how I have setup my yearly View note.
Setup daily notes:
Create a dedicated folder to store all your daily notes and the templates.
Use the file name format DD MMM YYYY (e.g., 10 May 2024) for each daily note.
Setup the template for daily notes:
Create a template for your daily notes with the following content:
# Events
```query
“{{date: MMM DD}}”
file: “Yearly View”
```
This code will display the event for the particular date.
Test the setup:
Cheers !!
