How do you document and track unscheduled but repeating tasks?

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1

These are mainly household tasks such as changing water filters, washing sheets, unclogging sink, descaling coffee maker, etc. But there are other ones too, like changing car oil, getting a haircut, getting an eye exam, or dental cleaning, visiting a grandparent, etc.

I want to be able to track these tasks or events and know how long it’s been since I last did them.

Would you use one note as a log, or have a different log note for each one of these tasks?

What I’m trying to do

Things I have tried

2

Creating tasks with custom reoccurring rules is difficult in Obsidian compared to Microsoft To‑Do etc. However you can manually create a new task to your daily notes using Calendar community plugin. As a consequence these daily notes will record the date of the task.

1 Like
3

The Tasks plugin has recurring tasks, see Recurring Tasks - Tasks User Guide - Obsidian Publish, which are quite capable of various repetition of tasks.

You can set stuff like which interval you want for your recurrence, and whether it should repeat based on original due date or last completion date, and much more.

Without any extra tools, besides the Tasks plugin, this is a very powerful tool for repeating tasks.

I’ve not used these too much, so I’m not sure if I’d place them in a note in their own, or how to organise them. Considering how the recurring tasks will create a new task each time you complete the previous incantation, it might be advisable to have them in dedicated notes. It would still not be an issue to maintain a colon task list showing what you’d need to do soon.

4

Some other ideas:

You can use date properties and date picker. You can have one single note for all of these household tasks. As you said, you want to know only the last time so you can use this YAML template:

---
sheets-washed: 2024-12-19
descaling-coffee-maker: 2024-12-19
# etc
# .
# .
---

Option 2:

You can use QuickAdd community plugin and capture choices. Then you have this workflow to report completed tasks:

  1. Run command QuickAdd: Run QuickAdd
  2. Choose Capture completed task etc
  3. Choose the appropriate file
  4. Done

This allows you to analyze data later like number of completed tasks in a year. With a text file you can do anything using various tools.