Obsidian for Project and Task Management: A GTD Inspired Vault for Beginning and Advanced Users

[@michaeltodd2012]

Thanks much for sharing. It is always interesting to see how users organize their workflow in Obsidian.

[@low-key3938]

thank you my friend, for sharing and caring.🙏🦅🇺🇸

[@breadbiiin]

First of all, thank you so much for the video and resources you created, I’m taking notes on so many aspects of the video it’s awesome. Obviously take the words of a stranger with a grain of salt but I would recommend reposting this video with a simpler title like “Mastering Obsidian” and reposting on some relevant subs. Obviously if your goal is to just provide a resource then I totally understand. I just feel like so many more eyes deserve to be on this! Regardless thanks so much for the time and effort and even though it doesn’t look like your content is aimed at me but I’m still subbing because I can see the hard work and consistency. Cheers!

[@FMTechpreneur]

Hey! It’s great to hear that it is useful to you, and I appreciate your thoughtful feedback! I see your point. What I think I’ll do is: since I'm currently building all my guides and notes in this Obsidian vault, I plan to make the title of my next obsidian video, which will address future enhancements, more general and include a reference to this video. In all my videos, I use Obsidian and give a small shout-out to the app or reference to this video. Also, I’m planning to expand the vault with new sections, like customizing macOS for productivity, setting up an effective folder/file structure, and outlining a maintenance and encryption plan. My hope is that, through these efforts, this video will receive the attention it deserves from people who are already motivated to use it. I don’t necessarily like to reuse content or repost because it feels a bit spammy/lazy. Maybe it’s something I’ll need to get over to market myself better, but at the moment I am not sure how to do it gracefully, haha. If you feel compelled to share it to friends and in comment sections, feel free to do so! Also, let me know if there are aspects of the vault that can be improved. I’d love to make enough adjustments to ensure its “future proof” to some extent. Anyways, thanks for taking the time to write up your thoughtful feedback!

[@joshuachambers9302]

Great video! Loved all of it (:

[@SeekingBeautifulDesign]

Congratulations on posting a video that requires a long attention span. Not a strategy to be well monetized on KZbin, but really the only way to get across more complex ideas. I do the same and no one watches ;) A ToDo system (GTD or otherwise) is really a set of information that would ideally have the cross referencing capability of a PKM. So building a GTD system on top of PKM software makes sense. But David Allen (and so should everyone) is big about reducing friction. The Obsidian PKM looks good and comparable to Logseq, but the UI friction compared to dedicated ToDo/GTD systems makes the choice of a dedicated app viable even though having PKM underneath is more architecturally elegant. How did you deal with the following when choosing to build your system vs. using an off the shelf product 1. How do you manage frictionless collection and integration of tasks? Handsfree/eyesfree dictation to a wearable (usually watch, but could be glasses) (I never even considered this, but now it's a must have after a week of use) 2. Slightly less important, but handy: how do you manage having tasks available universally. Technology today has wearables that display or read out your tasks 3. You mentioned you used Outlook for calendaring, but how do you manage the friction of Obsidian schedule tasks with Outlook appointments? 4. What is the mechanism to track your actual vs desired effort across the 7 Dimensions of Wellness? What algorithms to you use to support task selection vs 7 Dimensions? 5. Visual interaction made the mouse a huge deal in UIs. While most things can be done programmatically or with keyboard shortcuts, drag and drop tagging and ordering are really great. How do you overcome the friction of not having these capabilities? 6. How do you integrate with correlation apps? e.g. apps that correlate tasks with stress/recovery/mood via heart rate variability? (Since you mentioned you were interested in AI. Currently the AI hasn't given me anything useful, but it's still in training).

[@FMTechpreneur]

Hey! Thanks. I prefer to be thorough and packed with value over entertaining and no value. I like the direction your landscaping videos are going. I have a green thumb myself (bonsai), and enjoy everything plants can provide. Yeah, and truthfully, I think I am okay with a bit of friction, given its utility over off-the-shelf software that are expensive, less useful, limited/restricted, etc. To answer your other questions: 1. For frictionless collection, I have dedicated collection areas that are easy to reach. For example, the notes app on iOS is great for me. I have it on my phone and my computer, and they sync. Other than that, I don’t have enough of an on-the-go life that I need a diction device. I can imagine an apple watch to record and some AI software to convert audio to text would be useful in that case. 2. That’s a good question. It’s something that I will probably think about a bit more. Currently, I just process what tasks I need to do every day the night before, during my weekly review, or as they come up. I use my daily note to then check off those tasks. 3. This sort of ties in with 2. My daily planner is for soft tasks that I can do at anytime during the day. Outlook is for tasks i need to do at a specific time and day. Given the nature of my projects, I rarely have tasks I need to do at a specific time and day, and I find appointments and meetings come more so from people/work/email. 4. Good question. I actually have an app I am thinking about making to track how productive I actually have been. Currently, my best mechanism for this is setting a start and end date for tasks and seeing how far I was from my estimate and thinking about why. 5. I am not familiar with the context behind “drag and drop tagging and ordering”. E.g., are you ordering items in a list, files, or something else? I tend to learn what makes actions the quickest. If I manually do something faster than I could after having learned a shortcut, then I stick to manually doing it. My background is in electrical engineering, VLSI, linux, etc where hotkeys are required and mouse interaction is minimal/none. 6. Another great question. This is something I also need to think about. I am almost reluctant to for stress and recovery because I don’t want my productivity to become dependent on how my watch or some algorithm thinks I feel. I’d like to execute to some extent regardless of my mood. But there is something to be said for maximizing productivity by having an app suggest slightly longer breaks and fun breaks when stress is higher. Hope that helps! Good luck on your youtube channel!

[@SeekingBeautifulDesign]

​@@FMTechpreneur Frictionless collection-It's something I never realized I needed until I had it. Being able to record a thought the instant I have it...not even waiting 4s to find a phone really changes the mental landscape. I don't censor my thoughts because "It's not worth it to go find my phone or pen and paper or go to my computer...I'll just remember it'. And then there's the stress of remembering and the often forgetting. It sounds silly, but once you take the red pill... So, one can manually sync watches, phones etc., but it's nice to have your collection methods flow into one place especially if those methods themselves are ultra low friction. Calendar Integration-I don't find it so useful as well as I have a high degree of control over my time, but I know it's a thing for others. As well, the time blocking method requires tight calendar integration. Drag and Drop Tagging: Good GTD UIs allow you to see whatever view of your tasks. I too love the keyboard-Dvorak and IBM TrackPoint (hands never leave keyboard). But, for many being able to drag a task from the Inbox to the specific project fits their mouse or touchscreen world. I bought a 24" touchscreen monitor, and being able to organize complex projects by directly dragging objects around the screen is a small game changer. Drag and drop sorting: David Allen points out that we really aren't good at assigning priorities to tasks and that these priorities change from minute to minute. From psychology, we know that humans are good at comparing. So, sorting a task list so that the top task is the next action is really a game changer when presented with a great many valuable tasks that can't be further narrowed down by context. I plan to make a video on this. This approach is implemented in the non-Appleverse with Everdo and Nirvana GTD apps. BTW, I share your concern over privacy (and resiliency) with cloud storage of tasks. Everdo is the only fully functional system that is fully local with local network syncing and supports Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone (but no Watch :( ). And it's built on Sqlite, so you can directly query the db and do any relational db thing you want. I'm comparing the functionality and friction of your system and the time to build it vs $80US lifetime license and manual hooks to Logseq (or probably Obsidian) AI integration: I haven't found any correlations I didn't already know with the AI system, but the training hasn't finished. It was worth $40 to try the correlations for a year vs cobbling together a machine learning system myself. I suspect my task creation and completion patterns won't correlate with much of anything, but you never know.