I'm similar, but with vimwiki. <leader>-w-<leader>-w will open an entry for today's date, so for me ~/vimwiki/diary/2020-02-08.md. `<leader>-w i` will show a list of all entries. Pretty convenient stuff. I have mine start with a template as well, with a few common headers.
alias notes='nvim echo ~/notes/notes-$(date +'%Y%m%d').md'
The format being markdown gives a good syntax clue to vim.