How do you handle tasks in Obsidian?

[jaded79]

Ok, shoutout to the best solution so far: google tasks integration. More ideally, ical specification integration options. tasks.org is a solid open-source project that would mesh amazingly well with obsidian for task management.

[ottovanluchene]

Quick Capture

• Mobile → Google Keep ( Integrated with Frames plugin in Obsidian )
• Desktop → Note in Obsidian Root Folder or a quick note with Typora

Obsidian Task Management

• Plugin Tasks ( Basically checkboxes in notes ) and Daily Notes

[ottovanluchene]

Someone liked me post, funny thing is my system is already totally different .
Main reason is for the TickTick App I’m now using.

TickTick

• Quick capture to inbox
  • Tasks or Notes (With Markdown support)
• All Tasks go in here - with a priority system and due dates if needed
• Useful information exported to Obsidian.

Obsidian

• Custom PARA System (Projects - Wiki - Resources - Journal)
• All Projects are managed here, not in TickTick.
  • Dataview helps me to collect projects

[DanielKie]

I using plugins Tasks, it allows me sort and group my tasks. Right now I finished last task on this day and I understand what i should do tomorrow

[cwhiii]

This plugin (Obsidian Tasks) is CRAZY HELPFUL. Thank you for creating it & sharing it with us.

[daviddelven]

After months of testing different apps and workflows, the following seems to be a consistent and suitable one for my personal & work management, considering my professional profile is a combination of IT Consultant, teaching and also Architectural & Engineering technician.

I share it here just to highlight how I keep Obsidian as purely a note-taking/making tool, combining PKM & D on one side and Project management on the other. One of the essential decisions was decoupling Task Management from PM. The decided tool for that purpose is Todoist, but It could be MS To Do or another TM dedicated tool.

At the same time, due to the engineering background, there is a need for more granular and deep task management and a team-oriented system for some particular business projects. Those usually require applying Agile, and Scrum approaches. For that aim, we use MS Teams and MS Azure DevOps Boards. We have implemented a highly customized system in Azure Boards that fits our needs for Team Task management.

[CAD_O]

As a mechanical engineer who started a PhD 3 months ago, I basically landed on a similar system to yours. I tried for months to combine PKM, TM, meetings, review, plannings and such all in Obsidian and I just ended up with an incomprehensible clutter. The best solution for me was to find purpose built tools which could integrate into Obsidian (as it’s still the core of my system) thanks to plug-ins but which could also work stand-alone.

[daviddelven]

Happy to hear it. Quite aligned, then!

[Chen]

My current approach is quite similar to @ottovanluchene 's.
After trying to integrate task management in Obsidian for a few weeks, i gave up. There are too much friction to do it. Currently I manage the tasks in the following way:

Obsidian:

• Custom PPV system to break my vision to goals to projects (using plugin dataview)
• projects management (using plugin dataview)
• Create key tasks for projects success (using plugin tasks)

Todoist:

• task management of all tasks
  • quick capture
  • key tasks from Obsidian (manually copied)
  • any other tasks ( household…)

Google Calendar:

• all events with fixed timeslot
• Tasks from Todoist are synchronized in Google Calendar (2-Way-Synchronization)
  • Time-blocking for important tasks

[Yanina]

I’m ridiculously messy and also very lazy, I can’t be bothered to put my tasks in one place, move them around etc, I’d rather focus on completing them instead. Often I read some paper or watch some video, and it reminds me of something I should do – I just add a task in the middle of my note, whatever it is about. On mobile I use Markor → Quicknote; this Quicknote is located in my vault, so it is also searchable and query-able at any time. I just add a quick line of text directly from a widget on my mobile screen. From time to time I cut & paste the QuickNote contents to a new note with a timestamp, and a not-nice-but-true tag #dump, just to make sure it doesn’t get too big.
Obsidian is a godsend for people like me, because I can query my vault. Wherever I jotted my tasks, they all come up. I have daily notes where I see the tasks scheduled for today or overdue, I have a weekly overview where I see upcoming tasks when I need to plan for the next week or so, I also have project pages where I see the tasks with a certain word or tag in the description (project name usually). I sometimes have these project pages for contexts (e.g. when I’m abroad in a certain country, to make sure to buy this or that). This is the most effortless system I’ve ever had – and I think I have tried (and used for extended periods of time) most of them, because as said above, I am messy and I need something to keep track of my stuff.

The only thing I am missing is a conventional weekly layout with columns (I have a clumsy version of it, with embedded pages for each day in a table, it’s not too pretty). OK and maybe something like a Gantt chart, to visualize tasks with start and end date & to make sure I’m not trying to do too much stuff in parallel.

Shout out to the amazing Tasks plugin folks - they made it all possible.

PS: reading other people’s workflows… wow. I have really no room in my head to manage multiple tools another good thing about Obsidian, flexible tool for different people

[miscellane]

I’ve gone a rather lovely shade of Neo-Luddite, stripping my task system back to its quaintly weathered timber frame.

And I’m in love! It’s working so much better than all those complex queries, because it fits the way my brain and emotions work together. Read more in this Medium article I wrote on the topic. (Friend Link)

[RobOK]

I love diagrams like this, and share some elements. Couple of questions –

• what is the white box in the lower left labeled KM+D, what tool or tools is that? Or maybe I am misunderstanding what that box is? What are encounters?
• Is there no relationship between your People DB and Obsidian? Do you keep track of any people in Obsidian? Why do you even use Notion vs. using Obsidian and Data View?

Thanks!

[goldhaxx]

I’ve got Todoist integrated directly into my setup using the Custom Frames community plugin. Todoist is embedded directly in my Obsidian Right-Pane, along with an HTML version of my calendar. It’s reminiscent of Outlook’s interface, and I love it.

[rootcao]

Do you also create parent/child relationship between the action notes through parent/child links?

[jreinier]

There are many plugins which handle tasks. I made one called Time Ruler which displays tasks in a drag-and-drop timeline. There’s also Tasks, Full Calendar, etc. Most of these help you see all tasks across your vault.

[jiwonac]

I feel similarly lately. There are two types of tasks for my line of work. Small tasks with a deadline, and big “tasks” which I’m not even sure if I can complete them.

Examples of first type of task: Hand in assignment, create poster, respond to who and who.

Examples of second type of task: Think about this problem, try this approach and see if it works, browse resources that could help us make a headway, bang my head against the problem until it cracks.

It doesn’t make sens to organize the first type of task in a text file nor does it make sense to organize the second type of task in a traditional todo list.

I personally think the best way to organize the first type of tasks is a monthly calendar and the best way to organize the second type of tasks is a priority queue, sort of like a kanban board.

[johw]

I use tags for tasks exclusively in Obsidian because I truly hate the format to define tasks. The
- [ ] I mean. That messes up the complete clean look of my obsidian. Besides the fact it is a pain in the ass to type I find the layout of balletpoints (nested) is completely messed up.

With the #task/todo/prioA format of task I can quickly see what is needed and also the task looks good is plain text as well as in lists. It depends on the theme if it is lined up completely correct in lists (Shimmering theme does) but it looks a lot better.

Thinks like date completed I just add to the text of the task if needed. Mostly it is not.

[hiragp]

After searching and test several options, I found what I think is the best general solution for task management, which is the TIME RULER plugin. Already mentioned by its developer on this thread (@jreinier ).
I combine it with Tasks plugin/dataview js queries.

You can:

• Easily see the tasks on the different days and drag and drop tasks across different days and the schedule will be updated in the task, no matter where the task is. This is a game changer feature for me.
• Create new tasks directly from the day view and Task/dataview plugins will recognize it.
• One way sync calendar (read-only)
• Other things… Have a look at the documentation.

If you also use Task/dataview queries in combination with time ruler, you already have a pretty decent system to work with

In my opinion, Time Ruler deserves much more attention. I think is one of the plugins that better fights the lack of task format standarization in Obsidian. This lack of standarization mentioned here and here is basically what prevents us to have powerfull task management tool. Like for example the Logseq Agenda plugin.

I gave a try also to the Obsidian-task-calendar, full calendar, day planner… All of them are good ideas individually. Time ruler integrates a lot of their features so it starts to give you the feeling of a complete task management plugin.

[exztz1]

Try todo.txt and todo.txt approach using GitHub - mvgrimes/obsidian-todotxt-plugin: Obsidian plugin to manage todotxt files

It is basically a simple txt file, and it has apps in almost everywhere, see Sleek(GitHub - ransome1/sleek: todo.txt manager for Linux, Windows and MacOS, free and open-source (FOSS)) for desktop, but you do not need it because the todotxt plugin for Obsidian (works on mobile) is (generally) pretty good, but you can use them side by side anyway. I bet one can write a plugin/cron job to collect todo.txt lines from everywhere and put in a todo.txt file. I prefer to keep all-in-one for consistency.

Todotxt plugin

Sleek

[kenan]

First of all, I use Obsidian mainly for my professional life. I use different type of tasks for different type of purposes:

• Note tasks, where I need to continue writing/updating my evergreen notes.
• Meeting tasks, where I gather tasks related to meeting notes during or after meetings
• Reading Lists for literature notes which I also manage with Zotero using ZotLit plugin for creation and annotation extraction.

To manage all of this, I use Tasks Plugin and Dataview for querying different type of tasks like below:

Meetings for example:

> ```tasks
> path includes 02 Notes/Work/Meetings
> ```

For tasks related to notes:

For tasks related to meetings:

For Reading List, I have a note where my literature notes folder is and that lists the reading list as tasks with Dataview query based on the frontmatter of literature notes:

For the rest, I use TickTick and I don’t bother to achieve some kind of synchronization because I use GTD there too for my personal life where I want to have the task management outside Obsidian to be honest.