Just wanted to talk about the only separation I have in my workflow. Obsidian was a game changer for me when I discovered it a couple of years ago. Suddenly remembering and following up on thoughts was a game, and even more excitingly, a collection.

I fell off the productivity bandwagon a few months after. When I returned to the software about a month ago, the first thing I did was identify what went wrong the last time. Aside from going too crazy with community plugins towards the end, I believe my primary pain point was keeping all of my tasks readily at hand. Frequently I would write something to do in my daily note only for it to be lost and never followed up on. I would return to a note and see either a task I had completely forgotten about or a task that was later duplicated somewhere else in my vault.

This time around I have had a lot of success using a different utility specifically for tasks. This is not a Todoist sub so I won’t go into detail but it’s absolutely the missing piece of the puzzle. I try to minimize time from thought to writing, but this tiny bit of extra friction to categorize between “want to do” and “want to know” was a big help.

Curious on other peoples’ thoughts on this! I know some people do absolutely everything in Obsidian. What has worked for you and what hasn’t in terms of keeping your action items readily at hand?

  • @ArxirEnglish
    6•1 year ago

    I am surprised that nobody mentions dataview plugin… The thing about ToDos is that you need a central place to display them. This can be done with a dataview snippet in a ToDo-Note and Dataview is perfect for task keeping since you can add any type of key to your notes and display those in a sorted table as well, e.g. Deadline, Urgency, Workload, Parent-Note.

    It’s not sending you automatic reminders though, so if you are not habitually checking your ToDo-Note you might benefit from setting a reminder for that and eventually building the habit.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Appreciate the reply! Now that I have my mind wrapped around a couple of the more commonly-used plugins I think I could probably manage it in Obsidian. I do use Dataview for a few different utility notes, like making sure my YAML is properly formatted.

      I have definitely seen some nice-looking task setups in Obsidian. Perhaps one day I will try integrating the two again. For right now though I’m loving having a separate spot for my “thought inbox” and action items, using Obsidian as a means to brainstorm and explore further.

      Thanks again for the reply :)

    • upforitbutnotdownforit
      1•1 year ago

      Can someone give me, and anybody reading this who wants to know but wouldn’t bother to ask, a basic-as-possible idea of what the hell dataview does and why I would care? Or point me to something that does?

      I read what you wrote and yes I’m tired but my eyes sort of glazed over. What’s the “why it’s cool” for people who aren’t devs and only know Obsidian basics?

      • @Arxir
        1•1 year ago

        Yes, of course.

        Dataview let’s you list notes, which contain certain keys. So you can index your notes automatically.

        One can for example add category: and date: to the YAML and then use a dataview snippet like the following to list all work related notes and sort them by latest:

        LIST

        WHERE category = work

        SORT date desc

        With more keys you can make more conditions or show more information in a table. For example deadline: or urgency: in the YAML.

        You can also check for notes, which are missing information in their YAML through:

        TABLE

        WHERE !category

        There are lot of tutorials and the documentation online, if you want to know more.