I might be on the right track, but could I trouble you for a little reality check? I have a large number of tasks sitting in Word. I would like to try managing them in Obsidian. I’m making progress, learning that I must use the Refactor plugin because just dumping them in causes them to be one giant note that Dataview can’t comprehend. I also have to use the QuickAdd plugin to be able to quickly capture a task, but make sure it goes into the Tasks folder. Since there could be a thousand tasks, they should be in their own folder. Are there folks happily bopping along with this kind of arrangement, OR am I setting myself up for a precarious situation that will require a lot of fiddling, turning task management into its own hobby instead of an efficient tool? OR, am I missing any alternative strategies that could be a lot better? By the way, I’m using Dataview because of the way I manage tasks, it looks like it will be a lot better than the Tasks plugin. Any brainstorming or opinions are welcome. Thanks for any comments.
What you’re describing - one note per task with QuickAdd + Dataview - is actually a pretty common pattern and it works well once set up. The front-loaded complexity is real but mostly one-time. For a thousand tasks, I’d suggest keeping the metadata simple at first (status:: and due:: to start) and only adding fields you’ll actually query. The fiddling phase is mostly the template setup; day-to-day it gets pretty smooth.
Based on posts and what I want to do, I have a multi-dimensional (for want of a better term) method of working from my tasks list that it appears would be better facilitated by Dataview than Tasks. As for the many files: the method for keeping all the tasks in a single note can result in things getting bogged down. The name of each file could be the task, for example: “Cancel Microsoft 365.” But, as a rank beginner, I need to keep a very open mind about my plans.
I am very curious to hear about how you end up going with this. I am just starting out with tasks in Obsidian, and the only thing I am confident about so far is that I much prefer Dataview queries to Tasks queries. Something about the Tasks query results seemed aesthetically displeasing, and my patience ran out before my CSS skills could find a fix. Dataview results, on the other hand, just click for me. Yes, I intend my puns, and I much prefer the clickable results from Dataview compared to Tasks’ ugly link in long mode and the ugly link icon in short mode.
But I am taking advantage of Tasks different task icons and statuses. My Dataview queries are able to search for status = “I” to separate out the ‘ideas’ from regular tasks.
I am also very curious to hear about how Dataview crashes with a thousand tasks in one file. I am rebuilding my LogSeq tasks queue at the moment and expect to have hundreds (though probably not a thousand) tasks across dozens of pages. I don’t know if more files will make it better or worse, yet so far it is going swimmingly.
To summarise, I would just like to hear about a real world situation like yours, what worked and what didn’t, instead of just another “I read Getting Things Done and it says to do this” kind of post.