The Navbar
Every Time Garden note has a navbar at the top that lets you move through your journal without ever touching the file explorer.
Every note in Time Garden — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly — has a navbar at the top. It's a row of clickable shortcuts that lets you move through your journal without ever touching the file explorer.
What It Does
The navbar always shows:
- ← Previous of whatever layer you're on (yesterday, last week, last month, etc.)
- ↑ Up to the parent layer (today's week, this week's month, etc.)
- → Next of whatever layer you're on
- Some quick links to today / this week / this year
Click any of them. You're there.
Why this matters.
The navbar means a typical Time Garden session looks like this: open daily note → click up to see this week → click up again to see this month → click previous twice to compare to two months ago. Total clicks: four. Total file-explorer scrolling: zero.
Why It's Smart About Dates
The navbar isn't a hardcoded set of links — it's generated each time the note loads, based on the current date. So:
- On a daily note from January 1st, "← Previous" sends you to December 31st of last year, jumping cleanly across the year boundary.
- "Up" from a weekly note sends you to the month that contains most of the week (because some weeks straddle two months).
- A daily note inside week 53 of one year correctly links to the right ISO week.
You never have to think about edge cases — they're handled.
Modifying It
The navbar is generated by a template component called [Period] MetaBindNavBar.md (one for each of the five layers). They live in 06 Templates/Components/.
If you want to add custom buttons (e.g., a shortcut to a specific dashboard, or a "random day" button), open the relevant component file and add your meta-bind-button block. The new button will appear on every newly-created note of that period.
Existing notes won't update automatically.
Time Garden generates the navbar once, at the moment a note is first created. If you add a new button to the navbar template, you'll need to re-create old notes (or open them and re-insert the navbar component manually) to see the change there.
A Subtle Detail
Notice the small, quiet piped link near the top of every note that looks like [[2026-W17|]]? That's a hidden link to the parent week (or month, or whatever). It doesn't display any text — but it makes sure your daily note shows up correctly in:
- The graph view (you'll see beautiful clusters of seven dailies around each weekly node)
- The "linked mentions" pane of the parent note
- Any dataview query that goes through links
You don't need to do anything with it. Just don't delete it. 💛
Up Next
- Internal links — the broader concept the navbar is built on
- Adjusting Templates Yourself — how to customize the navbar's buttons
- The Welcome Dashboard — the one note that isn't part of the layered system but still uses the same link style