How do you handle tasks in Obsidian?

[nadavspi]

Very interesting thread. I recently switching from Roam to Obsidian and I’m not totally satisfied with my task management flow. I take a lot of meeting notes for work and

@datum

When I’m taking notes in a meeting and think of a todo or trigger, I put that right in the notes as an entry subordinate to the current note, which is usually a topic of the current meeting I’m in. Thus these items are dispersed throughout the notes because they were entered as I thought of them, wherever I was in the notes at the time. OmniOutliner can have defined filters, so I have one that finds all triggers and todos, and I get a custom view of the note tree, with the leaf nodes being triggers / todos, and the context of each one can be easily seen by following up the branch.

This was the reason I found Roam so frictionless for task management: I could mark any block as a TODO item while taking notes (optionally with a #[[to discuss]] or #feedback tag) and know that it’ll surface in another context using queries. In my daily notes template, I’d have a query that shows me all the TODO items for that day:

When I have a one on one meeting with someone, I open their page which has queries for open #[[to discuss]] and #feedback items tagged with their name:

(I also have queries for completed feedback and discussion items which is really useful retrospectively for performance reviews, etc.)

I’m still trying to find a good workflow within Obsidian for this. For now, I’ve resorted to noting TODOs in my document for the person. So, if I want to ask Sandy about the backup report next time we meet, I’ll put it on my page for Sandy:

Obviously, there’s more friction doing it this way. I’d love to be able to replicate my Roam queries on Sandy’s page, which I could do with search if Obsidian supported searching for matches per line rather than an entire document.

I’ve considered writing a script (basically grep Sandy | grep '- [ ]') that would append open tasks to Sandy’s page or create a new document TODO-Sandy document or something like that. Maybe ideally a plugin that shows the “queries” for the active document in the sidebar? One downside to this compared to Roam queries is that the person’s name would have to be on the same line as the TODO (whereas in Roam, as you can see in my first screenshot, the person’s name can be a parent of the TODO) but that’s not the end of the world.

Anyone else dealing with this kind of workflow in Obsidian?