Retired Techie

Introduction

Today I’m going to set up an Obsidian task system from scratch, focused on the tasks that still manage to find their way to my desk, even in retirement. Getting organized will help me capture things quickly and come back to them later without thinking too hard.

Obsidian is primarily a note-taking application, which isn’t strange since I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now to keep my daily journal. Thats how long it took me to develope the habit of writing in it every day.

Today I’m building a task management system alongside my journaling system. If I can get this working, the next step will be projects. Somewhere along the way, I’ll also want to look at theming and CSS snippets. But not today.

Since I covered the Map of Content and Journaling in a previous tutorials, I’ll copy those items from my main vault.

In the spirit of not dragging this out too long, let’s get to it!

Building a Test Vault

First, I’ll create a new test vault. For these tutorials, I consider that the starting point, it’s less confusing to begin fresh than to build inside a vault someone has been using for any length of time.

Next, I’ll copy a few elements from my working vault into the test vault. These are from earlier tutorials that I already migrated into my journaling vault. The goal is straightforward: get the system working in the test vault before moving it into my real vault. If you want to follow the same background, the relevant tutorials are:

• Can a Vacuum Tube Dinosaur Learn Obsidian?
• Old Dinosaur and Obsidian Part 2: Settings/Plugins

I did make a small change to the journaling system since the tutorials, adding Bases to sort and view a list of my daily Journals. To transfer it I copy the thre base folders and paste them into teh root of the test vault; Bases, Journals, and Templates. I will be covering Bases here, as it is essential for a task management system not relying on community plugins.

The other item I want to copy over is the “@Vault Content” file, which is the main “Map of Content” or MOC for the vault. An MOC is basically a page with a collection of links to other areas in the vault.

I’m importing these specifically because they give me the folder structure and files to work with when setting up Bases. If you’d rather, feel free to create your own folders and files instead.

Once we have some content, the next step is to adjust the settings of the test vault. The specific items I want to adjust are;

• Files and links → Default file to open → Specific file (@Valut Content)
• Appearance → Quick font size adjust → on
• Daily Notes → New file location → Journals
• Templates → Template folder location → Templates

Note Properties

To add Properties to an Obsidian note, you need to enable a couple of settings. These settings control where Obsidian shows and lets you edit Properties:

• Settings → Editor → Properties in documents set to Visible
• Settings → Core Plugins → Properties view set to On

In Obsidian, notes can include Properties, which are sometimes called front matter or metadata. This is a header block at the top of the file, started by a triple dash --- and ended by another triple dash ---. For example;

    Note-title
    ---
    Type: Journal
    ---
    Rest of File

Inside the Properties block, data is stored as key–value pairs, formatted in YAML (short for YAML Ain’t Markup Language or Yet Another Markup Language). It is a human-readable data serialization format. This fits Obsidian’s portable human-readable file format paradigm.

You can write Properties by hand, and with the settings above, you can also create and edit them using Obsidian’s GUI.

What matters isn’t the data itself; it’s that other programs or plugins can read this header block and use it to automate and enhance workflows.

What are Bases

Bases is a core Obsidian plugin. Turned it on from Settings → Core Plugins → Bases, set it to on.

To use Bases, you create a .base file. Like other Obsidian config setups, this file uses YAML to define how your vault notes should be queried and displayed.

A .base file provides instructions for scanning your vault notes and presenting matching results in different views; Tables, Lists, and Cards. Some community plugins can add extra view formats, but in this tutorial we’ll focus on the built-in options.

When you open or use a Bases view, the plugin reads the instructions in your .base file, finds the notes that match your filters/criteria, and displays them in the chosen format. The view updates based on your configuration, rather than behaving like a one-time script.

At this point, our goal is to build a basic understanding of what the different options and plugins do. In the next section, we’ll run through a few examples to show how these pieces can work together; like creating a simple task list (the purpose of this tutorial). Once those parts make sense, more possibilities will become clear.

Let’s Talk About Task Lists

Before we are build the task list, we need to decide what information a task contains. There are two parts: the actual content entries in a task note, and the task note Properties (metadata) used to summarize and track work across many tasks.

This isn’t a definitive guide to how to do tasks. I’m focusing on the technical setup, not the methodology. Everyone organizes work differently—so the goal here is to show how to structure things in Obsidian in a way that’s easy to query and display.

Task note entries can include several elements, not all of which require data. When something doesn’t apply, using “N/A” is fine. I am using the following elements. As usual, fell free to use whatever elements work for you.

• The task Title will be the name of the specific note.
• Description or executive summary
• Directions and requirements for performing the task
• Resources needed
• Progress Log
• Miscellaneous Information

Properties are used to track the work flow of multiple tasks at a glance, providing an overall status view.

• Type: Task (to distinguish task notes from other notes like Journal)
• Priority: Low Medium, High (three levels to keep things simple)
• Percent: Task completion expressed as a percent
• Status: Single word entries like; New, Assign, Hold, etc.
• start: Start date for a task
• Due: Due date of a task
• Parent: If the task isn’t stand alone, refrence its parent

Let’s Build a Task Template

To keep our tasks consistent, we’ll start by creating a new template.

1. Create a blank document named Tasks-Form, and ensure it is saved to the Templates folder
2. In the editor, click the three vertical dots in the upper-right area and choose Add file property
3. Add all the Properties we discussed earlier (Type, Priority, Percent, Status, Start date, Due date, Parent)
4. Add the task content sections as H2 headings (areas like Description, Directions, Resources, Progress log, and Miscellaneous)

Next we want to add a task to our vault.

1. Create a Tasks folder for standalone tasks
2. Inside the Tasks folder create a new note
3. Use Insert template (from the ribbon) and select the Tasks-Form template
4. Fill in the note with a sample task (it doesn’t need to be real since this is a test)
5. Create several more task notes with different values for the Properties

Once we have a good set of example tasks in the vault, the next step is to build a Base to display and manage them.

Let’s Build A Task Base

To manage our tasks we need to create a Base file. Since we turned on the Bases core plugin, there will be an icon in the ribbon for creating a new Base file

1. Select the “Create new base” icon form the ribbon to generate a new base file
2. Name it “Tasks Base” and confirm its location. If it is not in the Bases folder, move/drag it there.
3. Open the Tasks Base file and (for now) let it display every note in the vault.

For work flow efficiency, I want to add a link to Tasks Bases to my MOC @Vault Content. To do this open the MOC, and on a new line enter double square brackets. Then use the drop down to find Tasks Base. You can style this link if you want.

Returning to the Tasks bases file, it should display a list of every file in the vault. We can filter this down to the files we are interested in.

1. Set a filter for note type as “Type is Task”, which will remove non Task files from view
2. Since our Task-Form template is classified as a Task, it shows up also, so we add a second filter “folder is not Templates”

Next we want to add some data to our view. We do this by adding properties.

1. Select properties, to the right of filter
2. In the drop down check all the properties you want to display.

Now it is time to experiment and get comfortable. Do this by adding more tasks and more properties. Change the sort order in the displayed columns. Make adjustments to then filter parameters. Try different display formats. Work with Bases and it will be come second nature in short order.

Conclusion

This was a little complex, as we are dealing with multiple files and properties. But overall it is not that hard. if everything went correctly, you should now have a simple system to track independent tasks in Obsidian using only core plugins.

The next step for me is to take a little time to do some tuning, before integrating the files into my working vault.

The next logical step is to integrate tasks into a project system. However I also need to do some theming as well. You may have notices the font size adjustments from the settings don’t work on Base page. I need to find a way around this, as my eyes are not as young as they used to be.