A Great Setup to Organize your Life with Obsidian — Part. 2 — Tasks and Events Management

Obsidian is a wonderful software, and thanks to some community plugins, we can use what was initially just a markdown manager app as a tasks and events manager.

There are some pros and cons to using Obsidian as a tasks/events manager. We’ll see them right now.

Cons

We will begin with the cons so that you will directly know if Obsidian as a tasks/events manager could work for you.

• You won’t be able to set reminders (I’ve seen recently a plugin to integrate Apple reminders with Obsidian, as I don’t have an iPhone I can’t try it so I won’t talk about it). By reminder, I mean notifications that you receive on your phone, for example, 30 minutes before an event starts. Indeed, Obsidian works locally on your computer, not on a server, so for now there is no way to integrate reminders.
• Sync is harder between devices. When using a task manager like TickTick or Todoist, you have easy access to your tasks on mobile applications, or on another computer as tasks are stored on a server. When using Obsidian, there are some sync options but it’s not the more convenient. You can for example use Obsidian Sync but it’s a paid solution as it will cost you $10 per month. Or you can use some free solutions such as OneDrive, but as I said it’s not so convenient.
• You depend on Obsidian plugins. If one day a plugin is broken, then you can’t deal with your tasks and events anymore. In addition, malicious code can be hidden in the plugin code. But don’t be afraid, top Obsidian plugins are verified as there is a community behind and plugins are just files on your computer, so if you back up your vault correctly you can always get back to a previous version of a plugin if one day it breaks.

That’s all I found for the cons. Perhaps there are more, but in my specific case these are just the two things I found can be annoying sometimes. But I don’t use reminders a lot, and I only need to check my tasks when I am on my computer, so these two cons have little impact on me.

Pros

Let’s talk about the pros, it will be quite more pleasant as there are more than cons!

• Everything is in one place. This one is a big one because it’s soooo convenient. I guess it depends on the people but for me, I like having everything in the same place so that I can find quickly what I need and I don’t need to open dozens of applications. You have to be well organized else it is counterproductive.
• You can benefit from Obsidian features. You can use backlinks, you can tag your tasks (every good task manager can do it but it’s worth noting), and you can use the Dataview plugin to query your tasks…
• Tasks and events are stored locally. We talked about it above because it’s a con, but it can also be a pro. It depends on how you see things. For me, I like having everything locally because I feel like it’s more secure and I have total control over things (in this case I have total control as tasks and events are just markdown files).
• It’s free. Indeed, you can get free features that are paid for in some applications.
• You can customize your tasks/events manager as you want. You can add your tags, your lists, your filters, and your calendars, you can add tasks and events to notes…

My setup

Now, I’m going to introduce you to my setup. It splits into a tasks manager and an events manager.

Tasks

The first thing you want to do when you want your Obsidian vault to become a tasks manager is to install the Obsidian Tasks plugin. It’s the top plugin to manage tasks in Obsidian.

Then, I created a task dashboard. It’s a note where I can query and filter all my tasks. I mainly use 5 sections:

• Overdue
• Today
• Tomorrow
• All Tasks
• Project Tasks

I guess everything is self-explanatory except Project Tasks. Those are tasks linked to projects. For example, I have a project called “Gain audience on Medium” and in this project note, I can find all my tasks linked to this project as “Writing … article”, “Schedule …” etc…

You can easily imagine the Obsidian Tasks code associated with each of those sections. As it’s not an Obsidian Tasks tutorial I won’t give you all the codes, you can find them quickly if you look in the plugin’s documentation. I will still give you some examples:

• Overdue

```tasks
not done
due before today
sort by due
```

• Tomorrow

```tasks
not done
due date tomorrow
```

Finally, I also created something like a tasks filters panel:

It allows me to quickly navigate through my tasks and my most frequently used queries. It recreates a bit of the user experience you can find in most task managers.

To create something like this, first, you have to create a new note called for example “Tasks Navigation”. It will be the panel note. You have to do something like below to show your panel in other notes (the thing with the “^bar”):

You can already create the “All Tasks” link as it will link to the tasks dashboard you created earlier.

Then you want to create “views” (Overdue, Completed, Someday, Upcoming…). A view is simply a note with a reference to the panel block and a task query. Below is how you can reference your panel in another note:

Then you just have your tasks query below:

Once your view note is created, you add a link to it to the Tasks Navigation note. So, each of your views will show the panel, and the panel will have a reference to each view. That’s what allows quick navigation between your tasks and queries. You can add an unlimited number of views and you can customize your panel, here is just an example of how I implemented it.

Events

For the events, I will go much faster than for the tasks as I don’t implemented some kind of complex things as the tasks panel. I just use the Full Calendar plugin and it does everything for me.

It’s a plugin allowing you to fetch events from ical calendars or to manage events locally in Obsidian. So, when I need reminders, I store my events in Google Calendar and add the calendar to Obsidian with the plugin and when I don’t need reminders, I store my events directly in Obsidian. The plugin allows you to add as many calendars as you want so I can combine the events with and without reminders and see everything in the same place.

Please note you can’t edit events from Google Calendar directly in Obsidian. You can only access them in read-only mode. So you don’t have everything in one place, but it is not possible otherwise.

Final note

Like I said in the final note of the part. 1, I use Templater and QuickAdd to augment my workflow and my tasks/events management. But I will talk about it in a separate article, so be sure to follow me to don’t miss anything!

Edit: The next story is here. You can also find all my Obsidian-related stuff here: Use Obsidian Like a Pro

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