Separation of concerns, or "Why I don't keep tasks in Obsidian"
Separation of concerns, or "Why I don't keep tasks in Obsidian"
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?
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I tried to put my tasks all in Obsidian, but I eventually moved to Apple Reminders. Reminders sends me notifications about the task. Maybe Obsidian can, too, with a plug-in, but I don’t want to fuss with that. I also had problems entering a task in Obsidian on my computer and then having it show up on my phone quickly or vice versa, whereas (because I have both an iPhone and Mac) this is not a problem with Apple Reminders. Again, may be solvable with a plug-in but I don’t particularly feel like looking for a plug-in for something like this, no matter how irrational that feeling is.
Last time I checked, Reminders doesn’t have markdown support, and I’m not even sure if it lets me make line breaks. Not great for tasks that I need to write lots of detail about. But those tasks are usually far and few between, because I tend to write down the immediate next step to big tasks instead of writing down the big task and all the details I have to know about it.
@Emotional_Series7814 @nietscape
I like Reminders, too, but can't bring myself to use it as my only task manager. I keep an overview of what I've got going on in TaskPaper format in #Obsidian, and use Reminders of Calendar only for the few time sensitive things I need to keep track of.
FYI you can make line breaks in Reminders by pressing Shift + Return.
Good to know for PC. I also just checked on my phone and it looks like I can also do line breaks in the notes. Not sure if I misremembered things or if they added this as a feature recently.