Something was always missing
Over the years I’ve been through loads of task apps. From the simplest ones like Google Tasks, through solid standards like Wunderlist, Nozbe, and Todoist, all the way to much more complex tools: Asana, Trello, and for a moment even Bitrix24 (yes, for a one-person to-do list). Back then I kept my notes mostly in OneNote, although I also had a stint with Evernote.
In the end, something was always missing, or something didn’t work the way I wanted. On top of that, my notes were separate from my tasks, which made work more complicated instead of helping.
In practice, I worked on tasks alone. No linked notes, no context at hand. And when I needed the context, I went looking for it in my notes.
Notion and the structures that stayed
In the end, it was Notion that solved the problem of keeping tasks and notes apart. I loved its freedom. I liked building myself all sorts of dashboards and setups, so I’d have what I needed at hand.
Notion is also where I built the structures I still use today.
First of all, quick notes. Whatever happens, I don’t create a task, I don’t create a note, and I don’t decide what goes where. When I feel something is worth writing down, I just drop it into the quick notes section.
Usually at the end of the day I go through these jottings, pick what’s actually worth keeping, and turn it into notes or tasks. Before I start working through them, though, I check two more places:
- Email. I follow inbox zero, which means an opened email can end up in one of two places: the trash, or a folder that collects a particular group of emails. Either way, if the email calls for some action on my part, I write down in my quick notes what I need to do, along with a link to that email.
- Chat. At work we use Google Chat. When I see a message during the day that I want to come back to with some action, at first I don’t even move it to my quick notes. I just mark it with a star. During the review I collect those stars, remove them from the chat, and write the tasks or notes down in my quick notes.
On top of that, there’s a dashboard that takes me to the most important places in my system. It has a view of today’s tasks, split into work and personal, plus a list of pinned notes, recently created ones, and recently edited ones. That gives me an easy way into whatever is going on right now, without much searching.
Why Obsidian after all
I’d still be using Notion today if it weren’t for LLMs, that is, language models like ChatGPT or Claude. I moved to Obsidian because it works better with them and lets me work efficiently on local files.
Obsidian keeps notes as plain text files on disk. An LLM working locally, directly on files like these, works far better than one going through MCP, a connector the model uses to reach data in an external app such as Notion. That gap is slowly closing, but the Obsidian approach still suits me better.
The same system in a new place
All of this is basically the system I worked out back in my Notion days. Now I’ve simply moved it to Obsidian, and I use it in my everyday work.
The daily note plays the role of the dashboard. Quick notes sit at the top, below them today’s tasks split into work and personal, and further down pinned notes, recently created ones, and recently edited ones. Today’s tasks are gathered there from all projects and areas into a single list, sorted by due date, priority, how many times a task has been postponed, and estimate.
Tasks live in the project folder, next to its notes. I organize the folders themselves with PARA (projects, areas, resources, and archive), and I track tasks with statuses in the spirit of GTD, from “Not Started” to “Focus”. A task line leads to the note the task comes from. For example, the weekly task “Add a new item to my personal website” links to the list of topics, so I don’t have to repeat that list anywhere, and the context is one click away from the task. This post came straight from that list.
A pick-up note works in a similar way. When I interrupt work that’s half done, I run the park skill, a saved set of instructions for the model, and the LLM writes down where I am, where to start next, and which threads are still open. The task links to that note, and once the task is closed, the note goes away.
I make up for Obsidian’s simple interface and its limits around tasks with simple scripts: for adding a task through a wizard, moving it to a project, archiving closed ones, and pushing back overdue dates.
One thing has changed. Normally I’d write the tasks from my quick notes myself, but now an LLM does it for me. I have a skill for that, extract-tasks, which by default goes through today’s daily note and suggests tasks to add. I accept them in bulk, which is much faster.
Wrapping up
I’ve switched apps quite a few times over the years, but something only started to work once tasks and notes landed in one place. On top of that connection, I built quick notes, the end-of-day review, and the dashboard in Notion. When I moved to Obsidian, I carried them over almost unchanged.
That’s why today I think of my system as a set of structures and habits. The app is just the place where I keep them.
If you also keep jumping between task apps, think about where you’ll keep the context for your tasks before you pick the next one. Frameworks like GTD for organizing tasks or PARA for organizing notes are a great foundation. But to make them work, it’s better to adapt them to your needs than to change your habits to fit some ideal standard.