Creating a giant todo/task list that can be queried with tags

This may have been addressed before, somewhere, however I did not find it in my search. Also, it may be a common issue and there may be a simple solution. Here’s what I want to do:

  1. Create a todo or task list or everything and anything
  2. Search/query by tags that relate to each task (maybe multiple tags or search functionality
  3. Have Obsidian create/display a seaparate list from that search
  4. It would be nice if there was the ability to have tags for searching displayed at the top of the list, something like an index.

Ultimately, I would like to be able to report on all tasks that are tagged and isolate them in a separate list. As I add things to the main list, the new queries would obviously pick those up and display them. Is there an easy way to accomplish this?

I envisioned a Dataview + Databases hybrid, letting me build a table of tasks. Then at the top of the table filter columns like what can be done in Excel.

So far, I haven’t found an easy way of doing this other than creating a note for each view I want. I also use scoring to show only the top 10 or 50 tasks.

Viewing all your tasks in one place is slow. Plus, I can only do one thing at a time, so I only want to see the cream of what needs done now.

​Thanks @hittjw , I’m not really familiar with Dataview and I’m not a coder, so there are (2) strikes against me. There was another program that theoretically performed this task, except it was online only, not local ,the community was moderately helpful. Strange that text would load slowly, since it’s just text. Maybe searching a very large text (or md) file is the problem?

I’ll play around with it and see where I get.

Thanks again!

I’m thinking the KanBan plugin might be nice for you to take a look at. It provides multiple columns (or lanes) to group your task into, and in recent version you can fold the column (like stackable tabs folding) to allow for even more screen estate. The plugin then allows you to drag and drop tasks between the lanes/columns, and you can do searches within the KanBan board.

If need be, you can also have tasks/cards which have a note of their own to depict larger projects. All in all, it’s quite a useful tool for organising larger set of tasks and at the same time have some overview of it. And if you want to focus on one area, you could just choose that lane, or potentially build any query related to the board based on the section (which is where the tasks is stored within a lane).

In other words, it’s way to look at markdown tasks which are grouped under sections in a board like view allowing you to drag-and-drop tasks everywhere.

I totally forgot about this post, where i figured out how to pull tasks from one list to another with a little bit of code. Gonna play with it a little more

For now it works very well!

I think it might look like this:

tags include now 
tags include get
not done
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Part of the trickery might be to also exclude what’s being shown in other lists, if that’s a criteria. Then the expressions could start to get a little ugly…

How about some plugin to manage your task list?
If you use the keyword “task” a long list will appear, just make sure to install recent plugins.

  • gamified tasks
  • proletarian wizard task
  • task maker
  • etc

Yes, the Kanban plug-in is excellent. However, my tasks are across many documents, including project files. The challenge I have is managing tasks across the entire system. Some tasks might be in a document I’m editing with dependences in the project document.

The way I use KanBan currently in my vault, is that I got lanes related to areas of interest, and if it’s a smaller task it’s just got a task within the main KanBan note.

If however the task is part of a larger project (that is 5-10 subtasks), I create a note, and have that note linked from the KanBan board. This gives an overall status of the task in the board, and the details can be viewed/edited through the popover view.

At first I considered it a drawback that the KanBan task (with the link to the project note) wasn’t updating accordingly to the project tasks, but when thinking it over it’s actually kind of advantage, as you can then keep them separate, and move the KanBan task of the project around independently of the project tasks, if that make sense.


I’ve also had tasks spread across the entire vault, and found it disheartening and slightly confusing, so restricting myself to either the KanBan board tasks or project notes with task is kind of liberating and gives me a better order of my complete set of tasks. But your mileage may vary.

Another point related to your original request, is that actually gathering all tasks from all over the place, and still allow for some drag and drop functionality where you need to keep track of origin of tasks, and what tags/query parameters caused it to end in a given group, is actually a rather hard task.

The plugin CardBoard aims to do this within a KanBan style board, but I don’t think they’ve figured out the drag-and-drop yet. And now it hasn’t been updated in a year either.

Another similar project is the Task List Kanban, last updated 5 months ago, and now in a state of no longer being maintained. I’ve not tried it, but it claims that it do use drag-and-drop based on a tag (equalling the column/lane name). It can collect tasks either from the current folder, or all over your vault.