I’m a new user who has zero background in software or development and gets a bit spun out by github this and pull request that. I’ve already got a bit distracted installing others’ vaults and reading about long lists of plugins and want to start again with my most basic needs.
I want to take a general LYT approach (I don’t pretend to be an expert on it but like what I’ve seen) but I do know I also want/need People notes (a note per person I interact with) - and tasks to be part of my system.
Tasks :
I want to be able to add tasks anywhere - in a daily note, in a people note, in a meeting note and be able to see lists of tasks elsewhere
I want to be able to have notes that show me different lists of tasks - ones from people notes, ones tagged a certain way etc
People Notes :
I want to have a note per person that shows me where I have mentioned those people - might be as simple as showing where there are incoming links to that person note?
Questions
What does it sound like I would need to add over core functionality to achieve this?
Dataview? (which I’d need to learn about)
Nothing?
You can do embedded search queries without Dataview to list tasks and things. But I think Dataview is pretty essential. Especially if you want to filter and group and sort like you are saying.
I’m not a Dataview expert, and this is pretty simple, but I was pretty happy to discover this workflow. I figured out a snippet that would collect all tasks that are inside notes linked from one specific “Dashboard” note. Dataview: Tasks from all notes linked from one specific note/Kanban
So this is how I collect all my notes for A) Writing and B) My client/work tasks. I set up two dashboards (actually Kanban boards, but that is not necessary). And any note that is linked in that Dashboard will collect all of it’s tasks into another note that I keep pinned on my right sidebar.
But there are smarter people than me on the forum that have much more powerful Dataview queries. But once you grasp the basics of combining the syntax, it’s pretty approachable.
Otherwise, plugins and workflows are pretty personal. But here are my favourites. I try to keep it very simple, and I suggest going slow with adding them in.
Definitely learn how to use YAML metadata. You can create a bit of structure for people that will help you group and sort tasks by people later.
Templates (core) - This will help you create standard metadata. But don’t stress about designing this perfectly at first. You can improve over time.
Definitely read through the available commands, and play with assigning hotkeys to things you use all the time. But don’t rush this and change defaults until you’re sure.
Unique note creator (core) - for quick capture
Kanban (I like having a graphical view of things)
Omnisearch - fuzzier search
Quick Switcher ++ for more powerful search and switching and navigation
Random Note (core) and Smart Random Note, just for browsing and curating with serendipity.
I agree with @rigamarole in general, but for what you’re describing, the Obsidian Task Plugin will work perfectly. I have Aggregation Notes which are consolidated task lists of stuff to do for a specific thing.
For example, for our last house move, I entered tasks anywhere, just as I thought of them, and then had a single note that consolidated them and collated them with a simple embedded tasks query.
I know that you can do the same with Dataview, but I got hooked on Obsidian Tasks before I learned Dataview.
All good advice, but I wouldn’t at this time get in too deep with Dataview because it is going to be replaced soon-ish by Datacore, and Obsidian itself is in the middle of reworking how metadata can be written and used.
oh yeah, very good to keep in mind! (And all the more reason I like to keep my setup simple, and my queries pretty sparse and separated, so they can be swapped out in future APIs)
