How I manage tasks

Tricks & Techniques
1

I’m sure this will evolve, but this is what I use now. It’s very simple, but it works for me, and uses some nice SilverBullet features.

I have a TODO page that looks like this:

 {[Task: Remove Completed|Clean]}

* [ ] Task 1
* [ ] Task 2

In addition, I have an actionButton for this configured in SETTINGS:

actionButtons:
- icon: list
  description: "TODO"
  command: '{[Navigate: To Page]("TODO")}'

Now depending on what I’m doing, I may have my TODO page open when a new task comes up. If so, I just put it directly on the page.

Occassionally, I hit the “Clean” button to clean up the list.

Often, however, I do not have my TODO page open, but am in the context of some other page. In that context, I’d then like to create a task for myself. The way that I do this is by mentioning TODO:

* [ ] I need to do this [[TODO]]

Then, when I visit my TODO page again later, this task will appear along the top using Linked Tasks

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2

I personally maintain separate pages for each “category”, for example one for work TODOs, one for personal etc.

I make use of due dates heavily to surface things in my home/index page. I have 2 main queries in my index page, one to show me TODOs that I marked for today, one for ones that I missed(due before today).

I also have other queries like, tasks coming up for the weekend, or tasks I completed yesterday(mostly for work standup meetings) and task completed in last week. You can find out about the queries I have in my index page here.

As for clearing completed TODOs from the page, I like to retain a history of the things I have done and so I have an external script that I use to move the items into a separate file. It refiles the completed items into separate files under year/month folders. You can find the script here.

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3

My organization method is maybe a little more chaotic but I am working on it.

I have a TODOs page with a few categories on it like ## Personal, ## Work, and ## Bills. Under each heading is just a list of tasks.

Tasks on the TODOs page also get archived to a separate file (TODOs_archived) so I can keep the main file clean.

There’s also a Tasks page which lists all incomplete task items from all pages. My index page has a similar query, but sorts tasks by due date and limits to 10 or so.

I also have a folder of notes prefixed with InProgress/. These are sort of like mini-projects, or tasks that I want to keep more notes around. E.g. one note in there now is InProgress/2024-07-07 - truenas raid degraded where I have notes about my nas having a bad drive, confirmations for ordering a new drive, serial numbers etc, and tasks to make sure I remember to actually replace the drive and resilver the array later. Once it’s done, it gets moved out of InProgress/. Notes in this folder are sort of todo items on their own and I have a query on my index page to show them:

# Files in Progress

\```query
page where name =~ /^InProgress\// render [[Library/Core/Query/Page]]
\```

Daily notes are something I’ve never really been able to stick with, but I do make heavy use of Quick Notes and often put tasks inside of quick notes. These usually just get filed into Journal/ or some other prefix and I let the tasks show up on the Tasks or index page so I don’t forget about them. Sometimes these quick notes get moved to InProgress/ first though until I complete whatever task is in it.

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