I started using Obsidian and the brilliant Obsidian Tasks plugin to manage Tasks in my notes however it didn’t quite work for me as I would lose track of Tasks when away from my laptop, and there are no reminders for Tasks so it’s not easy to stay on top of things.
I wrote my first macOS App to solve the problem; Reminder Sync for Obsidian. It periodically scans your Obsidian Vault for Tasks and creates Reminders for them in Reminders.app! Once your Tasks are created as Reminders they are synced through iCloud so they are also visible on iOS; this solves the main problem I had with Obsidian Tasks, allowing me to keep on top of Tasks with system Reminders and Widgets on macOS and iOS.
Other features apart from the core functionality described above are:
Creating a Reminder adds a Task to an Inbox note in your Obsidian Vault, allowing you to create Obsidian Tasks from iOS.
Deleting/Completing a Task in Reminders app completes/deletes the Task in your Vault
The core functionality is free, and I believe the free version should be sufficient for most users. Paid features include increased automatic sync frequency, ability to delete tasks from Reminders.app and ability to generate a description for the Reminder.
Great idea and good start, Rahil. You’ve set a pretty high bar for yourself, and it looks to me it’s not quite ready for prime time. E.g. I’m not getting 2-way sync on edits, only one-way from Obsidian, and then date changes only sync when the task is updated. No subtasks or tags. I think you need at least the latter for this to be very useful.
Syncing anything is hard because of breaks/conflicts, on top of having to track tasks among potentially hundreds of files–sounds like a headache to me, and if you can pull it off you’ll be a hero. I humbly suggest you call it beta and remove the paid tier for now, add it back in when ready.
I’m definitely trying to solve the problem of editing in Reminders editing the Vault task however this is difficult as the vault task may contain links which are currently stripped to text for the Reminder description. In general I believe Obsidian should be the source of truth and the program behaviour reflects that right now. Perhaps I can add this as an option with the caveat that it cannot work with tasks with markdown hyperlinks.
Syncing due date changes from Reminders to Obsidian (and back) is possible and I’ll add that.
The EventKit API does not allow setting of the tags field you see in Reminders.app. The next feature is adding to the generate description feature the option to include child elements of the list item (likely context).
Subtasks (i.e. un ordered list children of un ordered lists) should be imported as separate Reminders, there’s no concept of Sub-Reminders so I’m not sure what is the expected behaviour here? Is it that completing a parent task should complete the child tasks?
Editing in Reminders: I understand the difficulty. In thinking workflow, I think if you could get date changes 2-way it will be fine for a user’s workflow. It would be clumsy to be looking at Reminders, then need to jump to Obsidian in order to, say, postpone something.
Tags: hmm that’s too bad that you can’t add those. How are you thinking that users would organize Reminders? One of my Macs is older so I don’t use the latest functionality. GoodTask, using the Reminders db, does create smart lists using any text in task name or description.
First of all, I’m happy that you started this project, because this is precisely what I was looking for. I immediately purchased the Pro version on discovery, and it seemed to do exactly what I want, however, a few bugs have come up.
For example, I get way more tasks sync’d to my calendar than I actually have—tasks that I have already marked as complete in Obsidian make it in to my Reminders in these cases. It appears to be related to the file cache. It seems as though, even though I’ve only specified one cache file (that’s all that is allowed via the UI), more than one are actually being used. I know this because the tasks are embelished with the name of the markdown file from which they were sync’d, and when I rename that configuration parameter, do a complete clear (and even factory reset), the next sync brings in tasks from both the old name, and the new.
Is there a channel over which we could communicate to resolve this bug? It has made using this plugin very close to pointless.
Also, as mentioned earlier, complete factory reset, clearing of the designated obsidian calendar manually, and restarting the entire process has not resolved the issue.
Hi @rahilb, thanks for creating such a wonderful application which fill the gap for Obsidian Reminders feature. I would like to inquire if it is possible to choose separate vaults for individual reminder lists? Is there any available documentation regarding this feature and other features that are available for Pro version? I am not able to test it out as it is only included in the Pro version. Nevertheless, it would greatly benefit me to learn more about this feature before deciding to purchase it. In addition, I noticed that tasks captured in Obsidian callout seems like it was not included to sync.
@rahilb , does this program require iCloud Drive at all? My work computer allows iCloud syncing (so it has access to read/write Apple Reminders), but my iCloud Drive is disabled. So, if this program requires writing to iCloud Drive or storing setting there, it may not work for me.
I bought the paid version of your app. I like it, but I have one major issue with it. I would like to be able to just sync tasks originating from one file within my vault, rather than the entire vault.
I use the tasks plugin within obsidian to summarize my task list within one file. Combining this with reminder sync results in duplicated task lists, which is rather annoying.
Greetings, apologies for the lack of replies on this thread; I forgot I had shared the app here.
@anushirawan are you still experiencing this issue? Please reach out to the support email listed at the end of the user manual: Reminder Sync for Obsidian
@nicholas.purdy unfortunately currently Apple’s API does not support 3rd party apps setting the dedicated tags field in the Reminder object; this is something I’m tracking though and as soon as it’s allowed I’ll be updating Reminder Sync to extract and set tags correctly.
@j_k The underlying storage mechanism of the Vault is not really important; it can be just a local directory that is not synced anywhere, and Reminders will still be populated. Syncing of Reminders across devices depends on your Apple account/macOS system configuration; i.e. Reminders.app will use iCloud to sync the Reminders across devices and Reminder Sync itself does not require iCloud Drive to function.
@Foff1nho@nebenfrau the next big feature in development is advanced filtering such that subfolders or individual notes can be included or excluded in a list, and support for multiple lists.
The other roadmap item is support for the data view task format in addition to the emoji format.
Hi @rahilb,
Great start with that app. I bought the pro version right away ;-).
For me support of multiple lists would be more important than filtering, as tags allow for that.
What would be even better in terms of workflow is the ability to get Obsidian Tasks synched to a Reminder inbox (current situation) then preserved and later updated (marked as done + completion date) in the original Obsidian file when the reminder is moved to particular list (related project).
Currently when I move a reminder from inbox, the task is deleted (if deletion allowed) or not updated (if delete not allowed).
Anyway, multiple lists could work for me as I replicate a PARA structure eveywhere (vault, storage, tasks), but it does not allow to manage a gtd-like workflow with a centralized inbox to later dispatch tasks.
