Imagine cutting a steak with a Swiss Army knife. You might be able to do it, but it would cost you more time energy and frustration that it would if you used a sharper steak knife. Not to mention, your steak would get cold by the time you cut a single slice.
That’s what it can feel like using a note-taking app as a task manager. Ok maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but you get the idea. Tools that are designed to do one thing are always more effective than tools that try to do everything.
Obsidian is best tool for thinking and writing. Its powerful flexibility gives it an advantage that no other apps have. But with over 1,600 community plugins, it can become a challenge to resist making Obsidian into something it is not the best tool for, such as task management. Knowing what you don’t want to use Obsidian save you a lot of time and effort forcing it to do something it wasn’t designed to do.
In the past couple months I was writing almost exclusively with pen and paper and it made me rethink how I use digital tools. A pen has one purpose, to put ink on paper. The notebook has one purpose, to be written in. What is the purpose of Obsidian? The Obsidian website says it’s a “private and flexible writing app that adapts to the way you think.” A core value of using Obsidian is to begin with the end in mind.
What is the end goal you have in mind when using Obsidian? Is it to manage your tasks or to develop knowledge? I would argue you shouldn’t use a task manager to write notes and you shouldn’t use a writing app to manage your tasks.
Now you might say, “but Tony there’s the Tasks community plugin that has 1.2 million downloads, are you telling me I shouldn’t use that?” No, I’m telling you to use the best tool for the job. If you think the Obsidian Tasks plugin is the absolute best task manager out there, use it.
When I first started using Obsidian I was determined to make it an all in one solution as a LifeOS that I could use to manage everything. This involves custom coding and constant maintenance, which starts to feel more like programming than knowledge development. I ended up spending far more time configuring the system to work as an all-in-one second brain than I did writing notes.
I propose a simpler alternative. Use tools that was designed for one specific purpose and integrate them with your other tools. The tool I use for digital task management is Todoist. I’ve been using it for over a year now and it’s by far the most flexible task manager for my ADHD brain.
Todoist has a robust API which allows you to sync it across multiple apps. That means you can input a task into Todoist and have it sync into both Obsidian and Google Calendar seamlessly, without opening even opening those apps.
Here’s how to do it in my Obsidian second brain vault using the Todoist Sync plugin, which comes preinstalled.
Step 1: Download Todoist if you haven’t. You can use my link to get 2 free months of Todoist Pro which will unlock all the features you need for personal task management. I have been paying for Todoist Pro for a year and for the price of a cup of coffee per month, it has helped me accomplish my most valuable work to this day.
Step 2: Sync Todoist with your Google Calendar. Go to your settings in Todoist and click Integrations at the bottom, then in the browse tab, scroll down until you find Google Calendar.