Build a daily review

Start each day knowing what arrived overnight, what is due, and what matters most, and end it with a short written record you can search months later. The whole routine runs locally: it needs no AI, sync, or account.

In short

Open Today, clear Captures, check today’s Tasks, scan reminders and notifications, look at today in Calendar, and write a plan in the Daily Note.

What you will build

By the end you will have:

• a Daily Note that Lar creates for you each day, with a review template;
• a fixed order for working through Captures, Tasks, reminders, and Calendar;
• a searchable record of what moved and what blocked, day after day.

1. Set up Daily Notes

Open Settings → Daily notes and turn on what you want:

• Create a daily note each day creates at most one note per date, on launch and at the day boundary.
• Carry over unchecked todos copies unfinished todo blocks from the most recent Daily Note into the new one. The originals stay untouched.
• Link todos to Tasks mirrors each todo into a linked Task dated that day, so it shows up in Tasks and Calendar. Checking the todo completes the Task.
• Default template for auto-created notes gives automatic notes a repeatable structure.

A useful review template:

## Plan

## Waiting for

## Notes

## End-of-day review

- What moved forward?
- What is blocked?
- What should start tomorrow?

See Daily Notes and Templates.

2. Open today’s note

Choose Today beside Calendar in the sidebar, or run Open today from the command palette. If today’s Daily Note does not exist yet, Lar creates it; every later visit opens the same note.

Keep it open as the review’s home page. Use tabs or the side panel to look at other Objects without losing your place.

3. Process Captures to zero

Open Captures and stay on the New tab. Make one decision per item:

• Convert it to the right Object Type when it should become durable knowledge.
• Send to Daily Note when it belongs in today’s record.
• Archive it when it is useful as it is and needs no more triage.
• Dismiss it when you do not want it. It moves to Trash, where you can still restore it.
• Accept, adjust, or decline a Workflow suggestion after reading it.

Select several items with their checkboxes to send, archive, or dismiss them together. Captures is a queue, not a reading list: the goal is to decide what each item becomes.

See Process your Captures.

4. Review today’s Tasks

Open Tasks and choose the Today tab. Then check:

• Inbox for open Tasks with no date and no deadline;
• Deadline for anything with a hard cutoff;
• Scheduled for Tasks dated tomorrow or later;
• Context if you plan work by Project, Meeting, or Area.

Complete what is finished. For everything else, make a choice: reschedule it, change its status, or keep it for today. Avoid copying Tasks into the Daily Note; link the one or two that matter instead.

See Tasks.

5. Check reminders and notifications

Choose Reminders in the sidebar to open Upcoming. Scan the Overdue, Today, This week, and Later groups. Choose dismiss on fired reminders you have acted on and remove on reminders you no longer need.

Then open the Notifications bell:

• mark informational items read;
• open errors and read them rather than dismissing them;
• run any Workflow action buttons you want;
• use the Captures footer (“… in Captures — open”) if new items arrived during the review.

The bell reports events; Captures holds content waiting for a decision. See Reminders and notifications.

6. Scan today in Calendar

Open Calendar in the Agenda view. Today is expanded and shows the Daily Note, open Tasks, Objects dated today under On this day, and everything Created on this day.

Overdue open Tasks roll onto today, marked with the day they were carried from. To reschedule the whole group at once, use Move all open tasks to and choose Today, Tomorrow, Next week, or Next month.

This view catches work that lives outside the Task dashboard, such as a Meeting at 3 PM or a Project milestone stored in a custom date property. Link anything relevant from the Daily Note. See Calendar and events.

7. Write the plan

Return to the Daily Note:

1. Under Plan, link the one or two Objects that matter most today.
2. Write a few outcomes rather than repeating the Task list.
3. Under Waiting for, note anything blocked on someone else.
4. At the end of the day, fill in End-of-day review.

If Carry over unchecked todos is on, unchecked todos move into tomorrow’s automatically created note. Linked Tasks keep their own status and dates in the Task dashboard.

Try it: find the days you were blocked

After a few weeks, type this TQL query into the search field in the app header:

type:"Daily Note" blocked order:created

It lists every Daily Note that mentions “blocked”, newest first, so you can spot recurring blockers. Choose ★ save beside the field to keep it.

Make the routine faster

• Use the command palette to jump between Open today, Open Tasks, Open Upcoming reminders, and Open Calendar.
• Pin a Project or Area you look at every day.
• Save queries for recurring checks, such as active Projects.
• Turn on Send a morning digest notification in Settings → Daily notes for a once-a-day notification that summarizes your open, dated Tasks. It is off until you enable it.

Next: Set up a Getting Things Done workflow. Related: Search and the command palette and Collections.