JOTS

smartJot

smartJots live in the body of the note, are based on a ‘decorated task’ and contain one or more basicJots (inline fields) to provide more detailed information.

A ‘decorated task’, something I was introduced to by @holroy in the Obsidian Forum, is an Obsidian task that has a customized checkbox style. Instead of being an open task (- [ ] ) or a completed task (- [x] ) we insert a different character between the brackets. Using CSS, we can then target these special tasks to change the checkbox to a different, custom character, which is why it’s referred to as ‘decorated’.

Using decorated tasks provide a number of advantages. First, they are visually easy to distinguish, so they provide a quick way of noting information of a particular type. Second, because they are technically a ‘Task’, you can use tools provided by Obsidians DataView and Tasks plugins to organize and visualize them.

While you can include a simple string of text in a decorated task, smartJots allow you to provide more context for your information by allowing multiple fields. For example, if I want to capture that I watched a TV show, there are many pieces of information that could be useful:

  • When did I watch it?
  • What show was it?
  • What episode was it?

To provide this information, I use a smartJot that looks like this:

- [w] (time:: 22:49) (type:: 📺) (title:: [[The Rookie]] - S06E03 - Trouble in Paradise)

Here’s the information that’s included in this smartJot:

  • “- [w] ” tells me it’s something I watched. I have an icon of an eyeball that I assign to these.
  • “time:: 22:49” is an inline field that shows when I finished watching the show (that’s the information I get from Trakt.com which does the capturing part for me).
  • “type:: 📺” is an inline field that tells me if this is a TV show or a movie.
  • “title:: [[The Rookie]] - S06E03 - Trouble in Paradise” is an inline field that tells me the name of the show (and links to a note about the show), the season and episode number, and the title of the episode. Because this field is structured in a predictable way (<series> – <SXXEXX> – <title>) I could further break it down with Dataview into it’s three parts if necessary.