One of Obsidian’s main advantages is that it’s highly configurable. This is to the point that you can build systems for managing your tasks entirely alongside your notes.
This can be powerful, to avoid context-switching from the app, which could potentially increase levels of distraction you’re exposed to.
Although I don’t use Obsidian for managing my tasks anymore, I wanted to go over the best plugins for task management that are available, because I know that a lot of people already use, or want to start using the app to keep track of things they have to do.
These are the plugins that I’m going to cover:
- Obsidian Tasks
- Kanban
- Dataview
- Task Collector
- Todoist Sync Plugin
I’ll explain the advantages and disadvantages of each and, where applicable, how I’ve used each plugin in the past.
Let’s get started…
Obsidian Tasks
This is the most complete and extensive plugin for task management in Obsidian. Nothing else comes close.
Voted winner of the Obsidian Gems of the Year last year, Tasks adds metadata for your markdown to-dos, in the form of due dates, start dates, priorities, scheduled dates and task recurrence.
It also allows you to view the tasks and mark them complete from within code-block views that are entirely configurable by task metadata. You can organise by anything that you might desire, and you can complete tasks from this generated view as well, adding a completed-date stamp to them (or not, this is configurable as well).
This is the plugin that I used when managing my tasks from within Obsidian. You can add information to the to-dos inline, with a drop-down menu that’s easily configured, or you can bring up a window that allows you to edit the task information in more detail.
One of my favourite features in this plugin was the ability to add dates using natural language. This is a feature that I use all the time in my current task management software Todoist, so it was useful having it in Obsidian.
I wrote an article about how you can make Obsidian like Todoist, which you can read here. It contains lots of useful information about task management in Obsidian, similar to what’s found here.
Kanban
This is the task management plugin that I used most recently in Obsidian. It was used as a content manager for the ever-growing bank of ideas and articles that I’m in the process of, or planning to write.
It functions as a kanban board with all the features you might require from such a plugin — you can display due dates on board cards in natural language, you can hide the date in the card contents which cleans up the view, you can create lists, archive cards and more.
This plugin is best for those who want to manage their tasks visually, organising them between different statuses or categories. Kanban allows you to drag cards between lists, as well as order them within the list. This can be good for managing priority or order that you’re going to complete the contents of the cards in, like I used it when it was my method of managing content.
Dragging cards from list-to-list is also very smooth; it’s quality like this that makes an effective plugin in Obsidian.
Dataview
This is a giant in the Obsidian plugin space, like I’ve mentioned previously in my writing. Less-known is the fact that this plugin can also be used to manage tasks.
Dataview is similar to the Obsidian Tasks plugin, in that it offers entirely customisable views of all the tasks across your vault. This uses Dataview query language, which is very powerful, allowing you to see any configurable collection of tasks in your vault.
You can mark tasks as complete from these views as well, and Dataview will give them a date stamp according to when this is. This is useful in hindsight, when you want to see when you’ve completed a certain task.
Unfortunately, Dataview doesn’t by default cater to any extra metadata added to tasks beyond tagging, but its very powerful when it comes to sorting tasks by location, tag or content.
Dataview would be a good choice for those who just have a few tasks that they want to track across their vault, not caring about having a lot of information related to the task. Because it’s built into the rest of the functionality of the Dataview plugin, it’s a good option as well for those who want to minimise the number of plugins in their vault.
Task Collector
This is a less popular plugin, with a role of managing the status of and tidying up your completed tasks.
There are certain snippets and themes in Obsidian which allow you to add custom checkbox statuses to the app. One such theme is Anuppuccin — it supports many different checkboxes representing information, ideas and starred tasks, to name just a few.
Task Collector adds keyboard shortcuts for assigning these statuses to tasks, as well as cycling between them, which is useful when you have a more complex task management system implemented in Obsidian.
On top of this, it offers the moving of completed tasks to a separate section of your notes, underneath a new heading. This was the feature that I used it for. I was creating large numbers of tasks and completing them, so they ended up cluttering up lists of incomplete tasks. Moving the completed tasks to an archive section of the note helped to keep things organised. This can be bound to a keyboard shortcut as well.
Todoist Sync Plugin
This is a plugin I don’t have any knowledge about, because I’ve never used it. I do know, however, that people want to avoid context-switching, and therefore use this plugin to show their Todoist tasks in Obsidian without the need to switch to the other app.
There’s an article that Marco Serafini published recently about how to use this plugin to fuse the capabilities of Obsidian and Todoist together. It’s a great read and tells you exactly how you can set up and use this plugin in Obsidian.
This way, you can use the power of quick capturing tasks anywhere using Todoist, and at the same time you can view, create and complete these tasks using views in Obsidian.
These are the best plugins that are available for task management in Obsidian — let me know how you manage your tasks in Obsidian, because I know there are a lot of different methods out there for this kind of thing.
I hope you’ve learned something new and actionable, and as always, thanks for reading!