#1

Obsidian’s development pace is wild. The app has advanced remarkably from just a few weeks ago when I first tried it out. Congrats to the devs! I am on the verge of going all in and signing up as a catalyst.

The new heading link feature is a great development. It made me yearn for better treatment of tasks, though. I’d love it if tasks could be linked to and searched for in a similar implementation, making tasks a first-class citizen of the app and facilitating in-line task and project management. (This’d also make Obsidian a TaskPaper competitor, I think!)

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To Do Aggregator
Follow-Up / ToDo as a First Class Object
How do you handle tasks in Obsidian?
Date/number ranges within search/filter
#2

I think it’d be useful to have some standard way to annotate tasks with some date/time, e.g. a due date or recurrence. This could allow for plugins like an agenda view.

I’ll admit that the “smarter” the objects become in Obisidian, the less portable the data is (e.g. org-mode files are plain text, but have so much “smart”-ness to them, they can only practically be used with Emacs). However, If the annotation style is well defined and clearly specified (for time, maybe something like in this post: Keyboard shortcuts to enter current date/time), we can avoid this?

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#3

It would be also useful to be able to click/check task/todo item in embeded notes preview.

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#4

Related https://forum.obsidian.md/t/please-support-plain-text-files-in-txt-and-taskpaper-format/4670

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#5

@ryanjamurphy
TaskPaper (3.8.10)
Puttering recently: this workflow seems to have the possibility for development and a plugin to explore.

  • Save daily TaskPaper task list to .taskpape document.
  • Change the extension from “.taskpaper” to “.md”
  • Drag the .md file onto daily diary page to embed and place it in the Obsidian vault at the same time.
  • Go to file in Obsidian vault, open new file info page, change file open-with default from default MD editor to TaskPaper.
    The markdown file updates when the TaskPaper document is updated and re-saved.
    Some TaskPaper keyboard commands convert to the OB markdown document, I have not tried all TP keyboard commands or other features, changes to text converted. Folding did not translate to the MD Obsidian page
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#6

Ah, clever ideas! Thanks for sharing!

#7

It’s almost like creating bullet journal pages because of embedding.

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#8

org-mode is ridiculously powerful for task managment, but it does come at the cost of incompatability.

having similar functionality to Taskpaper or imdone (my favorite app) in obsidian would be amazing!

#9

I have used zim wiki for a while. It has a task list plugin which captures all the checkboxes in the notebook (similar to vault) and orders them according to due time, priority etc. This is a really handy and elegant feature that I’d like to see in obsidian as well.

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#10

Taskpaper (or todo.txt) would be great!

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#11

Are there any news on this topic? I would love to see the capabilities of Taskpaper in Obsidian. Many of my tasks comes out of meetings where I take notes. Have a comprehensive task managment inside my notes would be awesome.

I used Org Mode in the past … but it was not really practically for me … to complex and to many keyboard bindings to remember. With the capabilities of Obsidian it should be possible to at least implement the basics of Org Mode in a much more user friendly way.

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#12

While maybe note the desired route, que new query feature allows for creating a note with a saved search to all open tasks with this code fence:

```query
/- \[ \].*/
```
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#13

That gets me a long way to where I need to get to. If I can set some useful exclusion filters (ie. don’t show tasks not yet due) it will be great.

#14

See the Vantage plugin. You can use it to generate date-based searches of your daily notes.

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#15

I don’t yet have tasks in daily notes as I’m coming from Roam and they are with project pages but I’m sure this will help @ryanjamurphy

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#16

Hey guys, it’s awesome to see this posts still active since it would be amazing to see this develop further.

personally I’ve gone through every app, org-mode is my second favorite, but lately I moved to Notion due to it’s endless customization of filtered views.

Your Experience

I’d love to know if for those of you who manage your tasks 100% in Obsidian, how has the experience been so far.

I plan to try to move my task managment set up from Notion to Obsidian once there is a Mobile app,(for easy capture of new tasks and ideas)

but until then I’d love to know other’s experiences, specially I’d love to know if there is anyone with a GTD like approach. (rather than a set-up based on date) of course if your set-up is more date / daily note based, I’d love to hear about it too

Thanks!

4 Likes
#17

I had been an Omnifocus user for many, many years and like others above found the swapping between not only between apps, but often between platforms too much of a hassle. With Roam and some plugins, it became very easy to have projects and tasks on the same page, and then use the Roam Toolkit plugin to quickly adjust dates eg, CTRL-ALT-UP add a day, CTRL-ALT-PGUP add a week. Roam’s backlinking then would just pull everything in. Never really did like the date formatting of January 27th, 2021 though.

For reasons aplently I started with Obsidian over the weekend. Got a lot of things worked out, but not yet tasks. Where I’d like to get to is:

  • tasks appear on the project page they belong to
  • ability to quickly shift dates
  • pages that can query tasks and show me what’s outstanding up to and including today without me needing to shift any of yesterday’s tasks’ to accomodate.

Absolutely a GTD approach. Now David Allen might say I’m overly reliant on dates, but I use tasks tied to projects on a recurring basis. eg., “Prepare directors papers” is not a calendar item, but rather a task on a project where I can add information I need during the month. Or another example is a quick task I’m currently monitoring for payroll preparation each fortnight. I don’t want to have that in Outlook where it is 100% likely to be missed.

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#18

In that case, check out the Review plugin too. It’ll let you assign pages or blocks to a chosen date via natural language.

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#19

good to know I’m not alone trying to implement a GTD based system in Obsidian @dcb I agree, as much as I think other apps do a better job with task managment, I’ve started to see how having everything in one same place would be really beneficial

At the end of the day, the best tool is the one we end up using.

Check out @ryanjamurphy 's recommendation, there are definetly good plugins and built in tools for a date based system.

I like the GDT aspect of lists, with out the use of dates, (expect for hard due dates, which I rarely use)

this is definetly down to personal taste, I’ll keep working on figuring a good workflow for tasks in obsidian, and once ther’s a mobile app, I might move my task setup over to Obsidian.

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#20

I think the ability to mark a task complete from a query result would be a big help. At the moment you have to go into the link, preview it and then mark as done

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