How do you organize tasks in Obsidian; short tasks, long projects?
I use Obsidian for task management. I use the Kanban plugin, so I have a central task board with backlog, graveyard, in progress, completed, and canceled lists. I keep my tasks there and move them into my daily note to track what needs to be done for that day.
Once they are done, I move them from the Kanban board, for example, from "To Do" to "In Progress," copy them over to my daily note, and once completed, I move them into the "Completed" list on the Kanban board. This is beautiful because it allows me to have one central location without reading it all at once, so I’m never really overwhelmed by how much I have to do. I only look at my daily note as I work and look at the rest of the tasks later.
Another beauty of it is that it’s still in Obsidian, so I can interconnect my ideas and notes using tags and backlinks.
However, the challenge is that I also use Linear for work. My team has all of their tasks on Linear, and sometimes I find myself looking for an issue, for example, today I had to update a task regarding a new plugin version for the Traefik proxy, and I’ll search through my Obsidian Kanban only to realize after a while that it’s actually in Linear. That split between having tasks in two different places is one problem.
Another issue is that the Kanban plugin itself isn't as intuitive or robust when it comes to sorting, prioritizing, or ordering by dates. When I create an issue on Linear, I can give it a due date, and it shows an icon when it’s past due. I can also sort by priority. I would love some of these features in Obsidian. I don’t want to move away from it because I want to keep that interconnectedness, but I need proper timelines and a more intuitive sense of dates.
A bigger challenge is managing long-term tasks. For example, I’m still in school and might have a paper due in two weeks. In Linear, I would organize this by creating a project with multiple milestones. (I’m a software developer, by the way, if you couldn't tell.) I’d name the project "Paper 4" and have milestones like "Outline," "First Draft," "Second Draft," and "Final Draft," spreading them across a timeline. Each project can then have specific issues.
How do you organize like that in Obsidian? Often, I have tasks that don't end in a single day, initiatives that take a while to complete. Is the solution just to chunk everything up and spread them around? I could have a task like "Get Outline done" and give it a date (even if the date isn't enforced) and use a tag for priority, but I’m not really sure. I would love some insight.
I've heard about the tasks plugin but I haven't really given it too much of a try.