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?
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…
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.
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
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.
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?
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
also quickly chiming in on this because if I understand it correctly, there is no feature request for all-device-system-notifications yet, right? or has it been archived/abandoned?
Couldn’t there be something that just launches a file in the vault at a certain time and that “file” is actually some kind of external program that sets a notification?
The mobile idea is interesting too… maybe something could be sent through the browser.
I need reminder support for mobile application. Currently, I use the reminder plugin, and it provides this functionality for the mac/windows obsidian app, but the android app doesn’t have this functionality yet. So I’m requesting this feature in the core mobile app because the dev of the plugin needs it to implement mobile support.
Thank you.
