I wrote recently about the three apps that have helped me build my life.
If you want to check out the piece, you can go here. If you don’t, I’ll tell you in short what these apps are…
- Obsidian
- Todoist
- Cold Turkey Blocker
Now it’s the first two of these that I want to focus on today. You might have noticed that one is a task management app (Todoist) and the other is a knowledge management app.
Now I could, and indeed did for a long time, manage my tasks inside of Obsidian.
But for a while, I’ve been completely segregating them.
I found that tasks and knowledge are two different classes of information and should be worked with in two different ways.
Putting them in the same app reduced the contrast between the two and it affected my progress and stress levels.
So in this piece, I’m going to go over how I used to manage the tasks together with my knowledge, what I do now and why I think that this strategy is better than combining the two.
How I used to manage tasks
You can read the piece about task management that I wrote here — It’s all about the different plugins and things that you can use in Obsidian for task management.
In this article, I mentioned that I managed tasks in Obsidian by synchronising with Todoist and rendering blocks of relevant tasks in my notes.
The project notes created by the Folder notes and Dataview plugins created points of reference for entire projects and areas. I could reach every note that was in the folder and all the tasks that were related to the folder.
How do I manage things now?
I no longer have my tasks rendering inside of Obsidian. Instead, I spend time managing them in Todoist, and when I’m clear on what I need to do I go over to Obsidian to work.
This removed the need for an extra plugin in my vault and just simplified things so that I could focus on task management (when necessary) and actually working with my knowledge, rather than having to maintain a productive connection between the two in Obsidian.
Tasks vs PKM — Some points to keep in mind
The reason I did this? Aside from added simplicity, I trusted my instinct to guide me in the right direction of what I had to create.
To explain this we’ll have to look a little deeper into the nature of tasks and knowledge/notes…
Tasks are obligations — they’re reminders of future time that you’ve already dedicated to do a specific thing. You have to complete or delete the task before the loop is closed.
The problem here lies in that most of the tasks that you capture are optional. So you capture all these tasks that you could do to make progress but don’t need to. And they build up.
When I relied too heavily on the tasks within my task manager it was demoralising. I was dictating every next move based on what I’d already written down, which is limiting.
I think that it’s better to just trust yourself to do the right work, to an extent — although you do need some guidance, the power to make decisions in the moment and move forward quickly without being dictated to by your task list is a valuable skill.
You want your mind to be open when you’re working with your knowledge so that you can make new links and spot details and insights that you haven’t before. If your mind is full of the hundreds of tasks you once thought were crucial but realised that they no longer are, then you’re going to be more reactive and unable to reach this deeper state of thinking.
So now what I do is I take only minimal tasks in my task manager (i.e. recurring ones that I shouldn’t forget and that other people are relying on me for). I don’t live inside of it, instead capturing ideas on the fly and processing them at certain points in the day.
Final thoughts
There’s no set way to manage your tasks and your knowledge — don’t blindly follow every method that I’m suggesting here. I think that there’s an individual balance that you need to find and maintain, between winging things and having structure through managing tasks.
What is clear though, is that you’re likely going to benefit from separating your task management and your knowledge management due to the differences between each type of information.
Keep the tasks out of the notes app to avoid confusion and reduce stress from constantly seeing all the tasks you have yet to complete.
Hope this helps, and thanks for reading!