TLDR. I’m using Obsidian tasks to control my tasks; it is painful in some aspects, but I will stick with it for now.
I have been feeling lost regarding tasks for a long time. I used to use Wunderlist, but in later years, I didn’t use it very often, and it was not very efficient. I was basically relying on whatever the work had to offer and managing tasks in my head, which is basically a mess.
I switched to Google Tasks for a while, but it was way too simple, and I missed the ability to take notes for each task—good notes, not just a text area.
The ideal
I need one place to keep notes and tasks in a format that is future-proof and where I have control over it.
- It should be easy to use from a mobile phone.
- Be able to store notes related to one task.
- Be able to create recurrent tasks.
- Be able to have projects and easily filter by projects.
- Integrates with my calendar
- Be able organise my current day.
- Be able to capture something to do (inbox) quickly
- Be able to process my inbox and organise it into projects/contexts.
- Be able to list all tasks from multiple projects in the same place.
Obsidian with obsidian-tasks
Seems to do the job! I can have tasks everywhere and use queries to organize how to show them. I love it.
Using DayPlanner on Obsidian is working well for me.
Bad things:
- Reminders, I can’t make them work (using iCal for that)
- No reminders on Android
Other tasks that I used
I’ve tried a lot of different ones, these are the systems I used in the last year or 2
Supernote
I like to write using my hand, but I’ve reached the stage where I have two places to organise my day, which is a bit annoying. I also miss a way to edit my notes outside of Supernote. If they open their format, I might come back. It’s an awesome product; it feels like writing on paper.
A paper notebook works better for what I’m using today, just random notes here and there.
I see myself using it less and less. I think I will switch to a tablet with obsidian on it. And may use Excalidraw to write shit down.
I am now Running Obsidian on Supernote. Let’s see if we can make good use of it.
Goolge Tasks
Keeping my tasks on Google Tasks
Good things:
- Easy to add dates
- Support recurrent tasks
- Shows on my calendar when I put a date
- I’m able to define priority by moving tasks up and down
- I’m able to add notes for each task
- I’m able to quickly add a new task from my mobile device
Bad things:
- It’s hard to organise multiple projects, I can create a new task list, but they don’t talk to each other
- I may be able to create them and define a date for the tasks that I want to achieve on a certain day. Yes
- It would be annoying as I have to go through each list to define what I will do on the day
- It is not a future-proof format
- I don’t control my data.
This solution was good enough, but I naturally switched to Obsidian.
org-mode
I look at org-mode from emacs, but it seems to be hard to use on mobile even with orgzly, and the plugin for vim does not work properly. I like the idea of keeping it all in one file and have support for recurrent tasks, seems like a complete solution. But for notes, I am used to writing using markdown format.
todo.txt
Looking at todo.txt, it seems like a good approach, it has most o my requirements in place, but it lacks notes related to each todo.