Everyone needs a system to manage their tasks and ideas. At the moment, my task capture and management app of choice is Todoist.

Despite this, there was a time in the past where I managed all my tasks in Obsidian, so I wanted to outline the system used whilst I was doing this.

This article’s for the people who want to have a task management system in the same app as their notes, without compromising functionality. I’ll explain the plugins, files and settings needed to create a Todoist-like task management function in Obsidian.

Let’s get started…

Plugins:

We’re going to rely on a couple of community plugins to make this work:

  • Tasks — one plugin that I haven’t talked about at length in my writing, but is powerful and very popular. It brings additional features to task management in Obsidian, which I’ll go over when I explain how to set up the system. It’s the plugin that this system is almost entirely built upon.
  • Task Collector (TC) — optional; useful for marking tasks with different statuses, as well as organising completed instances of tasks within your notes.
  • Packrat — optional; useful if you have a lot of recurring tasks, because Tasks adds a new task instance for every recurrence.

Now that we know what plugins are to be used, we’re going to look at the different files and views that make this system work.

Setting up:

Create a folder in the root vault, call it something like ‘Tasks’. In this folder, we’re going to add some files:

Inbox

Pretty self-explanatory. This is where you capture all tasks when they arise, just like the inbox in Todoist.

Backlog

This is where tasks go when you’ve triaged them in the inbox and they don’t relate to any specific project. This note just ensures that the inbox isn’t cluttered with lots of unfinished tasks.

Dashboard

This is where we use the power of the Tasks plugin to aggregate all the relevant tasks from across our vault and view them in one place. Similar to Dataview, you write code blocks, telling Tasks to search for items with specific properties across your vault. I had several views on my Dashboard…

  • Today — these were the tasks with the current day as the due date. The view was simple to create using Tasks:
tasks
due today
  • Overdue — the tasks that were due before the current day. Again, they were easy to render using the Tasks plugin:
tasks
due before today
  • Upcoming — the tasks due after the present day. Similar to the others:
tasks
due after today

The views automatically give the file location of the task and its properties, such as priority and start date. You can further customise the task views by defining sorting and grouping rules. Grouping will put the tasks under different headings, whereas sorting simply orders the tasks how the rule defines. Here are a few of the most useful:

  • by priority will group or sort the rendered tasks in the order of designated importance
  • by due will group or sort or group the tasks in order of their due dates. Similarly, by start and by done will group the tasks accordingly

This dashboard can contain many configurations of task views so that you’re always able to see all relevant tasks. The plugin’s documentation has extremely in-depth instructions as to how to configure the finer aspects of these views.

Archive

For tasks that are completed. Every so often, you’ll take all completed tasks and move them to the Archive, so they don’t clutter up your backlog and project notes.

The process:

This is how you actually go about managing tasks using what we’ve set up with the above steps…

You can capture in several ways:

  • Write the task in the inbox by opening the file and simply writing it at the bottom of the task list
  • Open the file and use the ‘Tasks: Create or Edit Task’ command. This will open up an interface for you to type the task and any of the data about the task that you already know
  • Use another plugin, such as QuickAdd to create a capture system that allows you to add tasks to the inbox from anywhere inside your vault. This is what I had set up when I managed tasks in Obsidian.

At the end of the working day, you go through and triage tasks:

If you didn’t add information to the tasks when capturing, it’s now that you add due dates, priorities, start dates and scheduled dates using the Tasks plugin interface.

Then you move the tasks to their respective organised locations:

  • Project notes — if you manage your vault using the PARA method, you’ll have relevant projects in your vault. It makes sense, in this case, to store related tasks in this project folder. The folder notes feature, provided by some plugins, makes a perfect place to do this.
  • Backlog file — if your task doesn’t have a related project note in your vault, you can simply store it in the Backlog note. This is what you created it for.
  • Archive file — if the task in the inbox was something that you had to complete during the day, you might have already checked it off the list. In which case, it’s got no further function to serve, so you can move it to the Archive.

Now that you have populated your tasks with information and moved them to their correct locations, you can use the dashboard to see what tasks you have next to do.

Perhaps you want to get your day’s work done, so you look at the tasks that are sorted by priority and due today. Perhaps you’ve created a custom view that sets out the tasks in just the order you need to complete them.

Once you have completed your tasks, you can check them off directly from their views on the dashboard. The plugin Task Collector helps with collecting all the completed tasks in to one place in your notes, so that you can easily move them to the archive.

With these steps, you can create a Todoist-like task manager within Obsidian. This means that you don’t have to swap apps constantly, improving the continuation of your workflow.

Thank you for reading. I hope that this article’s given you some advice or inspiration for you to put into action!