Expiration date or reminder for notes

[pmidbg]

Hi all,

I’m quite new to Obsidian, and I’m liking it a lot.
Everytime I try a new note-taking application I end up accumulating lots of notes - ok, that’s what they’re built for , but some of the notes keep their importance with time, some lose interest (a technology not used anymore, notes about a delisted stock, etc…).
I would find very useful to be allowed to define an “expiration time” (e.g. 3months, 2 years, …) when a note is created (maybe with a tag, or something like @expire 3M which gets expanded into a date ?).
Then Obsidian should notify me the expired notes, and I could act on them (update, delete or whatever), keeping my knowledge base up-to-date and uncluttered, or giving me the chance to review periodically some idea.

Anyone is missing the same feature?

Regards,

Paolo

[argentum]

If you don’t mind doing some of that work through the unlinked mentions, you could try this:

Natural Language Date Processing

From reading a lot of the plugin and feature requests, daily notes are a big thing with the Obsidian crowd. I know I’m a fan. What would be even sweeter is the ability to create links to daily notes using NLP. Linking to [[Yesterday]] would automatically change to daily note previous to the Creation Date of the current note. Linking to [[Tomorrow]] do the opposite. Future date math is cool because, whatever you just linked will be sitting in the Backlinks of your daily note when you finally get…

[icebear]

Would searching/sorting your notes by last modified (oldest first) do the trick? So you’re always reviewing notes that meet some criteria (tag of type, folder, etc) and reviewing the ones that were modified long ago? You make your way through this list by opening the note and making your determination to update or delete, either of which will move the note away from the top of these search results.

My own experience in a few months of Obsidian is that many feature requests I have can be solved by better use of saved searches and tag/folder practices.

[pmidbg]

Hi argentum and icebear,

thanks for both your quick replies.

Dates creations with NLP seems an interesting feature, and I think it would partially fulfill my needs: I could create new notes using a template with a default expiration, e.g. [[6 months from now]].

If I could create a saved search to filter (dates > today) I would solve my problem, but I’m afraid that regexes are suitable for pattern matching, not for date comparison…
Sorting by date could be a reasonable workaround - can I do it also if notes are in more than one folder?

Btw, I agree with trying to use existing features in the right way, whenever possible, to keep the product simple and lean.

Paolo

[argentum]

This might help with the date search functionality: Search a range of dates with Keyboard Maestro on macOS

When I have a little time, I might look into adding a way to generate the search operators from nldates. I’m not sure how many people are interested in that, but it might be good to know so I can prioritize the other things I’m looking into right now!

[Joern]

Hello,

I know this topic has been inactive a while, but maybe it’s important to someone. I’m currently developing a plugin for expiring Obsidian notes. You can check out the early version here: GitHub - joerncodes/obsidian-expiring-notes: Expiring Notes is a plugin for Obsidian, enabling you to automatically delete or archive notes after a pre-set date.