Facilitate the human's fractal journaling practice — gather fragments, surface themes, prepare review surfaces at every cadence (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, 5-year). The AI prepares; the human reflects. Use when the heartbeat detects a review is due, or when the human says "review my week", "monthly review", "what happened today", or any reflection prompt.
The human's reflective practice, AI-facilitated. Kepano's fractal journaling: capture fragments throughout the day, compile them into reviews at increasing timescales, trace how ideas emerged and bubbled up into bigger themes. The AI gathers, surfaces, and prepares — the human does the actual reflecting. The maintenance is the understanding. Don't delegate understanding.
Fractal journaling is not summarization. The AI's job is to make it easy for the human to reflect, not to reflect for them. The human's voice is the signal; the AI is the librarian who pulls the right files and says "you might want to look at these."
Three principles:
created-by: ai preparation notes. The review itself is created-by: human. The human's words are the durable artifact.| Input | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
| cadence | no | daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, 5-year. Auto-detected if omitted. |
| period | no | Specific period to review, e.g. 2026-W08, 2026-02, 2026. Defaults to the most recent completed period. |
| Cadence | Trigger condition | What the AI prepares | What the human writes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daily | End of day, or 2+ fragments exist for today | List of today's fragments, links made, notes touched | Nothing required — fragments are the daily capture |
| Weekly | Sunday evening (or 7+ days since last weekly review) | Fragment digest, themes across the week, connections made, open threads | YYYY-[W]ww.md — salient themes, what mattered, what to carry forward |
| Monthly | 1st of month (or 30+ days since last monthly review) | Weekly review digest, recurring themes, goal progress, pattern shifts | YYYY-MM.md — distill the month's patterns, review weekly reviews |
| Yearly | January (or 365+ days since last yearly review) | Monthly review digest, year arc, growth trajectory, 40 questions template | YYYY.md — answer the 40 questions, review the year's monthly reviews |
| 5-year | Every 5 years, or on request | Yearly review digest, life arc, identity evolution, decade themes | YYYY–YYYY.md — the long view |
If cadence isn't specified, check what's due:
daily/ for the daily note, vault root (or personal/journal/) for weekly/monthly/yearly reviews. Use filename patterns: YYYY-[W]ww.md, YYYY-MM.md, YYYY.md.Based on the cadence, collect the raw material. The Daily.base (embedded on each daily note) provides ready-made views: Everything (default — all notes except pure AI-generated, including notes without metadata), Human (only created-by: human), Fragments (journal fragments for that date), Reviews (weekly/monthly/yearly reviews covering that date), AI (only created-by: ai or ai-assisted). Use these as a starting point — they do most of the gathering for you.
Daily:
Daily.base → Everything view shows all notes linked to today except pure AI notes (the default tab)Daily.base → Fragments view shows notes with the YYYY-MM-DD HHmm prefix patternfile.mtime)[[YYYY-MM-DD]] backlinks)Weekly:
Monthly:
Yearly:
5-year:
Create a preparation note: inbox/reviews/YYYY-MM-DD Review prep — [cadence].md
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