A New, Plugin-Free Approach to Task Management in Obsidian

Start small and simple, and let complexity emerge on its own

Photo by Sergii Petruk from Scop.io

Full-featured task managers like Things, 2Do, Todoist, TickTick, and OmniFocus are wonderful at what they do. One of them may be perfect for where you are today.

They’re not for me, though. Not now, anyway. In my current renaissance of simplicity, I’m content with plain text that flows between folders.

If you take nothing else from this article, I hope you’ll consider creating your own Could file if you don’t already have one

And so I’ve welcomed a new folder into my Obsidian vault! It’s simplified my task/project management system, and made it remarkably more flexible. TO DO LISTS is its name, and it stands proudly in all caps, as do all my folders. (This helps them stand out in a list where the folder icon isn’t visible.)

Must, Should, Could, Waiting, Calendar

My current system follows these guidelines:

• One file per non-urgent task. Some ‘tasks’ are actually projects, so they contain subtasks within the one file.

• Urgent tasks or anything that should be done on or by a specific day (including repeating tasks) go in my digital calendar

The first four folders inside TO DO LISTS are —

1. MUST

2. SHOULD

3. COULD

4. WAITING

Must

The Eisenhower Matrix would see the MUST folder as the Important But Not Urgent category. I see it as the things I’ve committed to do in my personal and professional life: the things that must be done if I’m to get where I want to go. Interestingly, it usually contains only one or two items.

Example tasks: