Quick Notes — Highlights, Ideas, Progress

Highlights, Ideas, and Progress — the three quick-tap categories in Time Garden that auto-aggregate up through every layer.

Halfway down every daily note, in the ⚡︎ Quick Notes section, you'll find three little buttons:

+ Highlight
+ Idea
+ Progress

Clicking any one drops a tagged bullet point into your daily note. That's the whole UI. But what happens afterwards is what makes them powerful.

Things you want to remember. Moments that mattered, however small. "Bea laughed at my joke at lunch", "Saw the first tulip in the garden", "Finally finished the book". The stuff that, six months from now, you'll be glad past-you took ten seconds to capture.

💡 Ideas — `#idea`

Half-formed thoughts. A book idea, a project idea, a startup idea, a sentence you want to write down before it disappears. Ideas don't need to be acted on — they just need to be captured.

🎯 Progress — `#progress`

Concrete forward motion. "Ran 5km", "Sent the proposal", "Booked the flight", "Wrote 800 words". The stuff that feels like nothing day-to-day but adds up to a year.

Where They Aggregate

Every quick note becomes part of a flowing list that shows up in higher layers:

Layer	What you'll see
Weekly note	All 3 categories aggregated — every highlight, idea, and progress note from the past 7 days, clickable back to its source daily
Monthly note	Same, but for the month
Quarterly note	Same, for 3 months
Yearly note	(When configured) — same, for the year

You write the bullet once on the daily note. It shows up on every layer above for free. (See Charts & Visualizations for how this appears.)

Why The Tags Matter

The #highlight, #idea, and #progress tags are how Time Garden's dataview queries find the right bullets. So:

✅ Use the buttons (which insert the right tag)
✅ Or type the tag manually (e.g., - something cool #highlight)
❌ Don't change the tag spelling or the aggregation breaks

Want a 4th category?

You can add custom tags (e.g., #gratitude or #worry) — they just won't auto-aggregate by default. To make them flow up to weekly notes, copy and tweak the existing aggregation components in 06 Templates/Components/ — Weekly Highlights.md is a good template.

Should I Use All Three?

Use what's useful. Some users only ever tag highlights. Some only progress. Some use all three religiously. There's no wrong answer.

A starter habit.

Pick one category for the first month. Drop one bullet a day. After a month, look at your weekly aggregations and ask "would this be more valuable if I'd been tracking the others too?" If yes, add the second category. If not, stick to one.

They Feed The AI

If you turn on Include Highlights / Ideas / Progress in the plugin's prompt settings, your tagged bullets become part of the context the AI uses when summarizing your week / month / quarter.

That can dramatically improve summary quality — the AI is no longer guessing what mattered to you, it's working from your explicit signal.

Up Next

Charts & Visualizations — how Quick Notes display in higher layers
Customizing AI Prompts — feeding tags into AI context
Adjusting Templates Yourself — adding your own custom Quick Note types