Looking for ideas on task & project management for adhd

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What I’m trying to do

I’ve been using Obsidian for over 2y now and have a good process for daily notes, but my task & project management needs work.

The big issue for me is my ADHD. It’s easy for me to get psyched about a project, go all in on it for a week or two, then it can go completely out of mind when something else comes along (either an interest or an emergency).

I also tend to write down ALL the tasks, even small ones, because if I don’t I will forget. But it’s also overwhelming if there are a ton of tasks.

What I’d like is

  1. not losing track of necessary tasks, which I’ve done somewhat with due dates and a dataview in my daily notes that shows tasks that are due today, are late, or have a priority higher than Medium

  2. manage projects better, with priorities, tags, & due dates to help me know what I need to work on

  3. Figure out how to incorporate a Gannt chart so I can see where I am in a project, including what’s been done & what is left.

Things I have tried

I ditched Todoist in December to go all in on Obsidian, using both the Tasks & Projects plugins. tbh, the same issues I had in Todoist (overwhelm & losing track) are still there in Obsidian, which makes this a clear ‘me’ issue.

Task management is OK. My aforementioned dataview helps, but I tend to have a LOT of tasks as I need to note it down and when I look at notes with lots of tasks it easily becomes overwhelming. My brain constantly forgetting doesn’t help :confused:

As far as the Projects plugin, I’m not sure I’m using it right. It feels like each note in the table should be a task, perhaps with subtasks in the note. But I also have research and other notes, and those don’t seem like they belong in the Project table. Maybe Projects isn’t right for what I want to do, though I really like being able to make columns out of tags and then sort based on the columns.

Any suggestions are appreciated, I feel stuck without knowing what to try next.

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I have just joined the forum today - truly - and I spotted this. So this is my maiden post in reply.

I empathise with the task of getting order out of chaos. My (Ubuntu+Windows) dual boot desktop is littered with archives and repeated notes.

Now I thought that as an experiment I might include Obsidian in a workflow, a tool chain, which draws together these assets including in your case priorities, tasks.

My plan is to use an indexing engine Recoll which can index every damned piece of information you have in your desktop and in external drives (I use external docking bay where I can insert SSD’s in caddies).

Now in Ubuntu I install Recoll. You do not mention what desktop you use. Windows/Linux/Mac?

In Ubuntu I set off Recoll indexing. On first usage this might take hours in background.

Now I have just looked at my Recoll GUI and typed in query: Obsidian. I see old assets going back to 2021 when I first toyed with Obsidian.

If you have some vague recollection of keywords (even decades ago) you can find them using the powerful Recoll query. Hover cursor over query field to see a cheat sheet of typical queries.

A companion tool I juse in toolchain is CherryTree a hierarchical notes editor.

https://www.giuspen.net/cherrytree/

In there you can write your actions.

Importantly save CherryTree as XML file extension *.ctd.

Now CherryTree documents can be indexed and can export content into Obsidian vault.

An important technique is to use Recoll to search through all CherryTree documents (I have hundreds) by using the query notation ext:ctd.

This means show all extensions *.ctd.

This is a lot to take in in this maiden post but I am preparing a description of this workflow which “finds the parts that others do not reach”.

Recoll is an ingenious tool, backed up by CherryTree and thence deliver into Obsidian.

I suspect that with ADHD you would benefit from visual representation of tasks, data. More on that later.

I hope this helps since I have an interest in getting order out of chaos and clutter. Simple hierarchical structures do not cut this task. Think of a multidimensional model
Like a Rubiks Cube but more dimensions.

If you can vaguely remember some keywords Recoll will find a short list of documents containingg these keywords.

If you install CherryTree I can post CherryTree documents as examples.

My own newbie experiments with Obsidian will continue.

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I’m on Mac but I don’t want to index every document on my computer. But you are right that better visual representations do help me.

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In Recoll you can target a specific directory rather than the entirev desktop. In your case target the Obsidian vault (but there are many assets you might need outside the Obsidian vault. even in emails. Search “thunderbird” for example. I don’t know if Thunderbird is an email client in Mac. Adapt search profiles.

Further research into ADHD note taking uncovered these notes.

This published advice fits well with my suggestion to use CherryTree as part of a workflow. A tool chain where Obsidian is one link in the toolchain.

This article discusses visual note taking.

Now returning to CherryTree this can be an important link in the toolchain for creating memorable notes.

Within each CherryTree document we can embed CodeBoxes.

Go to CherryTree > File > Preferences > Preferences > Plain Text and Code.

Here we see a list of languages which can be leveraged.

Basically we can embed scripts into each note as Codeboxes to be executed as nodes are read.

We can embed Python3, powershell, and when in the middle of a CherryTree node we can “Run Code” and leap out into a visual dimension. Such as a chord diagram or mindmap.

Or we might simply drop in a URL to a site such as

Mind map.

Here is the starting gate to use Creately.

Also explore …

This is one approach to building visual constructs. The question I am expoloring is how to pass such visualisation assets through Obsidian which is largely Markdown.

Another markdown editor to try is Zettlr.

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Hi @Cheezballz

i’m trying to solve this problem for myself and built this specifically to deal with adhd task management:

it’s a small desktop app that works on top of your obsidian vault to show your latest tasks (+ help you prioritize using ai)

this just launched yesterday and is really rough around the edges, but could be in the direction of what you’re looking for.

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I find it worrying that these discussion threads close after 3 months.

“This topic will close 3 months after the last reply”.

So one of my first dev tasks will be to archive threads.

Returning to ADHD scenario my view is not to embrace new emerging plugins since you then have a new dev dependency to worry about.

Browsing around I found these sites.

The YouTube presentation is rich with ideas and I plan to build on these … makes good reading as a foundation.

And remember that CherryTree allows mind map structures. My time will be spent integrating Obsidian with other such “helper” apps. If a plugin is developed it will be to orchestrate this chain of apps to suit the way I work…

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In typical ADHD fashion this thread disappeared from my brain and I only realized when I came here to research something :laughing:

I saw that task mgmt vid last week and immediately implemented it, with some modifications for my needs. Having a ‘task board’ feels way better than the Projects plugin.

I also need to have some sort of visual progress indicator for my projects. I wanted a progress bar but I have to extricate tasks from the Projects plugin first. So my quick hack was to just use the Heatmap Calendar plugin as I already used it to track habits.