Some time ago I got into the situation to quickly set up a functioning project management in the engineering field. I decided to do the whole thing in Obsidian and have not regretted it so far. After gaining some experience I wrote an article outlining the most important lessons learned. I hope it is useful for one or the other!
I’m also interested in your experiences, so feel free to share your techniques and experiences.
I had put off investigating the Project and Kanban plugins and found your overviews of them, as well as the other sections of the write up, super helpful.
I’m glad my write-up was of some help. Projects and Kanban are both great plugins, but it can be difficult to find the right one for a particular use case.
Looks nice. But for someone to set all this up from scratch will take them all day, right? (Being generous, I would, and have, gotten obsessed and spent a week or more tweaking similar setups)
A dedicated task/project manager app has this stuff out of the box. And is so robust. what happens when one of your project titles needs to change, and you decide that really it is a subproject of another project, and also you want to move half of its tasks/notes over to that other project?
In omnifocus I would 1. Change the title 2. Drag one project into another 3. Drag those tasks to the right project. It would take 20 seconds and nothing would break. I wouldn’t even need a second tab or pane.
Relying on dataview means having to update every instance of it, every time one of the fields or titles changes, or any other overhaul happens. It means having to describe, in code, what every dataview instance should be querying (even if your template gets you mostly there)
I could go on, and don’t mean to sound critical. I just want to save any one else the weeks Ive lost to building a project/task manager inside a plain text notes app
With this I have a great overview where everything is. by hovering over the project names (links) it displays me the picture of the project which makes it easy to find what you need when you have a lot of open projects.
Every time you click on Open daily note, a new one opens with a backlink to the project in which you clicked the new note button. If you work on multiple projects a day and click on different “open daily note”, the date stays the same but the No. gets increased by one. That way no tasks from different projects get mixed up.
I use tasks (- ) where every unfinished task from that project gets displayed in the todo section. Even if there are multiple tasks from different days, they are all displayed, which is really handy.
The “daily note” note is kept very simple, only adding tasks and important emails or pdfs from that day. I have a field under properties which I have called Quickfind, which is displayed on the projects page making finding information I received on a specific day very easy. Usually for things like: “Client acceptet offer” or the like.
Almost everything is automated. I just click a button and the note is but in the right place with automatically applied backlinks so everything is connected by itself. There are a couple of things I’d like to optimize, but all in all it works really well. It took a lot of time and help from the community but it was worth it.
I’m not sure, but performance-wise my setup is probably not optimized. It can get chugg a bit when loading stuff, but I guess it’s normal with all that interconnectivity.
That’s awesome you set everything up in Obsidian! It’s amazing how customizable it is. I’ve used similar methods for managing projects, but one thing that helped me stay on top of milestones was using the Jira roadmap feature. It gave our team a clear view of where we were headed and what to prioritize. Seeing it visually made it easier to track progress and adjust as needed.Your idea of structuring projects with Kanban blocks sounds pretty efficient. It’s great to hear how you’re using Dataview and the Projects plugin too—seems like you’ve found a solid workflow.
Prevent analysis paralysis
Structuring projects in the vault
Folders vs 
Tags vs 
Dataview queries?
Adding a Landing page
Project blocks and milestones Kanban style
Using the Projects plugin
Project notes and metadata
Meeting notes
Referring people (and resources)
Task Management
Task lists using Dataview
Checklist items on steroids — the Obsidian Tasks plugin
