Reminders in Obsidian

Feature requests
#1

The more I’m using Obsidian for day-to-day notetaking and task management, the more I’m looking for a way to set reminders on tasks / notes:

Example 1: I have a conversation with a friend and I recommend them a couple of interesting articles / podcasts that I would like to pick up on to discuss in our next conversation. I want to set myself a reminder for in one week to ping my friend again about the piece of content we wanted to talk about. I can obviously set a calendar reminder etc but then I have to go back to Obsidian to look up what we were talking about and then message my friend. Instead I want to see the reminder directly in Obsidian, which is where I manage all my daily tasks anyway.

Example 2: A business partner asks me to write a proposal for a joint project which we want to submit in a couple of weeks. I don’t want to do it right now because I’m separating reading emails from acting on them so instead I define a task by creating a note for the proposal and maybe link two or three related notes that will help me write the proposal. Now, the email is going to drown in my inbox so in order to remember to actually work on the proposal I would like to remind myself in Obsidian in say 3 days. I could put the proposal note into the daily note for in three days but I feel that a workflow like the Chrome extension TabSnooze (https://tabsnooze.com/) would be way nicer!

Any thoughts on how to implement reminders in Obsidian or any other workflow suggestions? :slight_smile:

8 Likes
#2

Not exactly related, but the following two plugins may be interesting:

1 Like
#3

Hey, thanks for the recommendations, I’ll keep an eye on both!

The biggest question I have right now is how far can you stretch the “everything is markdown files” thing and when are databases the right fit.

For example: structured, recurring entries such as tasks (date, start, end, duration, project, subproject) might just be a better fit for Notion, Coda, Airtable, Trello, Fibery etc.

On the other hand, the snappiness and structureless nature of Obsidian / Roam is way more convenient for knowledge creation and making connections between previously separate notes.

I tried using Coda as an abstraction layer on top of Obsidian for structuring notes, tasks etc, it’s currently just lacking the ability to open obsidian://.../ links…

#4

I think I’m on a similar journey as to how deeply I can integrate my workflow into Obsidian. I started going through all the Third-Party Plugins today on account of the recommendations above and found this:

It’s a very getting-things-done-y understanding of reminders (no push notifications), but maybe this is useful for you.

#5

I think Notion is showing how nicely “inline reminders” can be done. I would not say a database approach is necessary for that. Anyway Obsidian is keeping a database in the background anyway. As long it’s seamlessly updated whenever Markdown files change, that’s fine. The truth is in the Markdown :wink:

Why not allow reminders of the form @2021-2-24T10:30 and when the time is reached they are shown in a list with a bit of context.

7 Likes
#6

Still have no Reminder in Obsidian ?

#7

Let’s Hope they add some functionality soon

#8

you can use this plugin.

1 Like
#9

Here is a proof of concept plugin that sends desktop notifications:
shabegom/obsidian-reminders: Desktop notifications from markdown files

#10

There is this plugin now:

Looks really promising.

2 Likes
#11

Works great, with the caveat that the reminders only pop up within Obsidian itself. But, the developer has an open issue to make the notification a system notification instead: bring obsidian to the front at the time of the reminder · Issue #5 · uphy/obsidian-reminder (github.com)

Hopefully, the system notification will work on mobile too.

Either way, it’s pretty dang cool already.

1 Like
#12

Hi, I’m a developer of the reminder plugin.

Hopefully, the system notification will work on mobile too.

Unfortunately, It’s not possible as far as I know.
Because Obsidian API doesn’t provide system notification feature.

If it is possible, I’d like to implement mobile notification.

5 Likes
[Feature] notification support for mobile
#13

Does it not provide the system notification feature only on mobile or both? Because I remember seeing maybe the Day Planner plugin using the Windows notifications.

Edit: Also, will the plugin be coming to the community plugins any time soon?

#14

Reminder plugin already provides system notification only for Windows and macOS (by using Electron’s API).

Also, this plugin has already been in Community Plugins.

#15

You can look at org-mode for the design of various such features. Benefit of having text only data/metadata is any app following the standard (org-mode) can implement them independently.
Eg Logseq has implemented most common features (including scheduling tasks), sync files, and on Android Orgzly which understands org files and has notification system already implemented so reminder functionality works on all devices and you can schedule it from anywhere