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?
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:anddate: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:orurgency: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.