For anything that’s singular, simple or otherwise fairly quick to execute I’ll keep as a task and use the backlink to go to the originating note, so that I can remind myself of the context within which the task arose and also remove the distractions of other tasks.
As I engage in the project, any thoughts and notes that arise along the way will find themselves in Obsidian. I’ll then simply delete the task in Obsidian, or at least just remove the ] link - or maybe replace the link with a #ProjectTask and maybe a ] or whatever task manager link so I keep a reference if I want to go find something. Anything that’s complex or big enough that it warrants significant time and potentially a bunch of sub tasks gets entered into my preferred todo app of the moment - Trello, Planner, ToDo, etc.I can see all my tasks as backlinks and there shouldn’t be that many because I’ll be triaging them as follows:.The ] page itself remains blank, but this is where the Backlinks panel is my friend.This can be simple, complex, the start of an entire project, or anything in between.Any task that arise out of a train of thought be marked as such e.g.This is an interesting topic, since it’s making me think about my own strategy. And sorry I didn’t mean to hijack your thread off into a separate discussion - was just being a Hopefully you’ll get some good input Although I don’t see much friction in switching app contexts - Things is open on my ipad and I look at it once a day (or more often if a day has interstices) to make sure I haven’t forgotten to work on something I have going. So more a point of view than difference of opinion. I wouldn’t need a complex system to keep track of that task because it’s right there on my notes about the issue. So I guess we are actually on a similar path - it’s just that I don’t think of “ Lookup Pangaro’s latest paper on cybernetics” as a task so much as a bullet point on my notes about the problem.
I would tend to think of “ Lookup Pangaro’s latest paper on cybernetics” as a bullet point in a note I was keeping in regard to my investigation of a particular issue with cybernetics. My career is one of those that doesn’t consist of a bunch of individual tasks (ie call Joe or meet with Bob NEVER show up in my task manager, “what is relation btwn X & Y” or “map characteristics of unit A” often do). I find that a task manager to manage weekly and daily reviews of the things I’m going to focus on works well. And I get it - particularly because those complex task managers were non-starters for me as well. That’s why I created this feature request: Making tasks/todos a first-class citizen I use this metadata to add things like reminders and filters to plaintext task files.īut I’d love to be able to query tasks from within Obsidian. I also use DEVONthink, which can add metadata to existing files. I think I’ll use a hashtag to track these as well. I have personally been creating tasks as whole new links from other notes, such that each task is its own note. So, I too would value a few features in Obsidian to make inline task management easier.
#Obsidian notes full#
I have found that, because the task manager is full of other things I’m not currently doing, but are important, switching into it and accidentally seeing many of those can be distracting and cost my train of thought. What’s less obvious is the cost of switching to a task manager to add a todo to - Lookup Pangaro's latest paper on cybernetics or - Finish that paragraph in the introduction. Neither is - Write paper, and we certainly don’t want to add - Discover big problem with the approach we've used for the past month. Have world-changing insight is not a task worth putting in a to do list. But the more creative/generative a work is, the less it fits with a set of hierarchical todos.Īs Ahrens and others write, research work doesn’t lend itself well to this kind of planning. Task management apps work well when projects and tasks are concrete and well-defined, or are easily decomposed into concrete well-defined structures. So, I quit task management apps and started using plaintext to keep track of what I had to do.
I was doing a lot of organizing to keep my projects and tasks aligned with notes and writing, to little benefit. Then I abandoned it for the same reason as the OP: I found I experienced too much cognitive overload in switching app-contexts.