Obsidian Bullet Journal Tasks Migration in Daily Note

I’ve been tinkering with a modified, task-only Bullet Journaling approach in Obsidian for about a week now and it’s been nice, so I wanted to write up how I’m approaching things.

First, a bit of background. I’ve actually tried Bullet Journaling on paper in the past. I’ve used everything from found scraps of paper to a Field Notes notebook subscription and even invested in some nice cards and a wooden card holder from Ugmonk.

Each time I try “BuJo” I end up bouncing off of it after a week or two—for me at least the analog nature of the paper and pen(cil) approach has always been a downside. Working with physical media has meant that I’m not going to always have those items around, won’t be able to search them from whatever device I’ve got my mitts on at the moment, and in general it’s just not been convenient enough for me. In no time flat the notes, notebooks, and habit are gone.

I’ve also had trouble keeping up with various task management systems, so my recent foray into Obsidian and the Tasks plugin has actually been one of the longer-lasting for me. The previous best was Apple Reminders, but I found that the notifications for tasks ended up being ignored for things that I couldn’t get to right away, even though they might come up whenever I arrived at home, each week, or however I’d set up that app to remind me. Reminders makes for a great shared list, though! I love using it for grocery and packing lists which I share with my wife. I’ve also been tinkering with a Shortcut that “sweeps” tasks from Reminders to Obsidian which lets me keep some of the ease of use for adding reminders via DingusSiri.

With that out of the way, here’s how I’ve adapted Bullet Journaling’s monthly migration practice into a daily Obsidian migration with the goal that any task entered into a daily (or other periodic) note be migrated, but that tasks can be moved elsewhere to what I call “projects” and no longer need to be migrated.

The first step is to set up a couple of new statuses in Obsidian Tasks’ plugin settings under Custom Statuses. I’m using “Migrated” and “Project” statuses to denote tasks moved forward from prior days and out of the periodic notes area of my vault, respectively.

1. “Migrated” task with > as its symbol, NON_TASK as its type, and “ “ as its next symbol:
   - [>] => [ ], name: 'Migrated', type: 'NON_TASK'
2. “Project” task with < as its symbol, NON_TASK as its type, and “ “ as its next symbol:
   - [<] => [ ], name: 'Project', type: 'NON_TASK'

Next, I add a new callout block with a tasks query to my daily notes template:

>[!important]+ Migration
>```tasks
>not done
>
># Above, the new tasks statuses were given the
># type "NON_TASK" so that we could filter on that here.
>filter by function task.status.type !== 'NON_TASK'
>
># Recurring tasks show up elsewhere in my daily notes
># template, and it doesn’t really make sense to me to
># migrate them.
>is not recurring
>
># Modify this line to match all files that
># have your periodic notes in them
>path includes Daily/
>
>path does not include 
>
># As the goal is to migrate all of these
># forward, this doesn’t matter much but having
># them sorted like this works for me.
>sort by priority, due, created
>```

Now that setup is out of the way, the work begins. At the beginning of each day, I migrate forward all tasks that I want to keep on my to do list. I retype each task into the current day’s task list area. If the task doesn’t already have a created date I will add it, setting it to the date of the daily note it was created in. I’ll carry forward existing created dates, due dates, started dates, priorities, etc. which gives me a chance to modify things like priority, status, or due dates. As I go along, I’ll change the status of prior days’ tasks to Migrated with - [>], usually by right clicking or holding on the task’s checkbox in the task query results.

During this migration process, as in analog Bullet Journaling, if a task isn’t worth typing out it can instead be marked as cancelled with - [-]—this and “In Progress” with the - [/] syntax are other custom statuses I’ve added. Sometimes a task was actually completed but not marked off on the prior day - in that case I’ll hop over to the previous day’s note and mark that task as completed with the date that makes sense.

More frequently than cancelling tasks I find myself moving them to a project, which I do with the - [<] “Project” status, repurposed from Bullet Journaling’s “Scheduled” bullet. One nicety I allow myself here is that if a task is moving to a project, I’ll copy and paste the whole line instead of re-typing. Tasks in projects also no longer need to be migrated in my system. That’s a feature and a bug: it means that they’re not something I see every day unless I’ve added due, scheduled, or other dates to them. If they do have a date (other than created), they’ll show up in one of my “Today”, “Overdue”, or “Next 2 Weeks” queries which are also in every daily note.

When I’m migrating, I’ll sometimes find a task that should have some kind of link either to another page or to some external URL. I’ll go ahead and add that link¹ to the description of the task. When migrating a task with URL, I’ll copy and paste the URL from the previous task as well as those often aren’t reasonable to type out. Also, the emoji that Obsidian Tasks uses can be hard to type out. I usually let the suggestion popover from the plugin fill that in for me.

My new Obsidian Bullet Journaling Migration practice helps me to keep tasks top-of-mind. I also attribute at least a few tasks being completed to it being just as easy to do the thing than to re-type the task that tracks it. It also gives me a small sense of accomplishment each day to have something done, even if it sometimes feels like busywork. Some days I wonder if it wouldn’t be nice to add - [ ] Migrate previous tasks to my daily template, which would give me something to check off first thing in the morning.

One final note: I asked about this approach on Mastodon the other day and was overwhelmingly cautioned against using a system like this. The general feeling was that the friction of re-writing tasks by hand “helped to par (sic) down the stupid things that it’s too easy to just dump in a digital system”, helped to “cull what I don’t need and keep [the] system streamlined”, and that inevitably a “digital system gets fuller, fuller, until it’s overwhelming and unusable.” I suspect that all of these folks are right, but this is working for me for now!