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?
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.
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 :)
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?