How I Import My Meetings Into My Obsidian Daily Note
How I automate importing my Obsidian daily note’s meeting schedule from my Outlook calendar events.
--
One of the things I did not like about my original Obsidian Daily Note Template was manually adding all my meetings each day. There are days where I would add the first meeting, then never add another. Then, when I get to the end of my day, I would end up back in Outlook, trying to figure out what I spent my time on. Let’s face it, if you’re not all in on this note-taking, it’s simply a waste of time, and it’s limitations like this that will keep you from using Obsidian daily notes over time.
So, I decided to figure out a way to automate importing my calendar events. I have a corporate Microsoft Exchange account, so I initially thought permissions would block me. My first thought was an API and some sort and a fetch call. I found Microsoft Graph but quickly realized that would be too much work for authentication etc., plus it would require building a plugin and middleware and more. Too much work for too little return.
Then I remembered that I saw somewhere that Obsidian could execute commands in the terminal and show the response. So I had to do a little searching to find what that was. That something ended up being the Templater plugin which I already use for my daily note template anyway. So this is where I started digging further.
I quickly found icalBuddy with a google search for “export my calendar to the terminal on macOS. So this was going to be easy after all.
Here’s what I did to get this working locally. In the end, it wasn’t too hard to set up. Unfortunately, it was not a simple install and be up and running, as you’ll see, but it is doable by anyone with no special programming needed.
This article only pertains to macOS. I don’t know if there’s a similar utility to icalBuddy in Windows. I’m sure there’s something similar. Leave a note in the comments if you know of one to…
