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?

  • 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.