It’s hacky and will always be as long as Obsidian does not use a database. But, on the other hand, the developers came up with a simple to understand / elegant approach to working with blocks inside a plain text markdown file where no one else could or could be bothered.
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Agreed. I didn’t mean to be critical when I used the word “hacky.” Poor word choice by me.
I actually use blocks all the time. They’re a great way of making one source of truth for a given line.
I use this for tasks, mostly. I’ll have a task in a project that I want to (try to) complete on a certain date. So, I add it as a block to that date. The day comes. I see it on my list. I get my courage up, manage to be disciplined for once, and do the work. I tick it off in the daily note—then it’s complete in the project note, too.
(I made the Review plugin to facilitate this workflow—see the “Review this block” command.)
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The insert related and open in DevonThink palette commands are exactly what I want to get from this. Not many systems complement each other as neatly as these two do in this configuration. Thank you for making this!
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When I heard about this a couple weeks back I was really excited. My need and hunt for a work around stopped.
I’ve been using Drafts for quick capture input and push it to my DropBox folder, but then have too go back and rename it when I get back to my MBP for the full Obsidian.
I was using 1Writer to edit remotely on my iPad, but my issue was I often also had that document open on my MBP and it would create multiple copies of the file as versions (one instance was around 40 copies with incremental updates to the document over 10 minutes or so).
I think @MitchWagner clarifies what is going on in his use of Craft (see in a scroll below).
There isn’t direct access to the markdown files, which I have been really used to for the last 9 to 10 years of using NValt (before it died). It fixed my issues with notes in Evernote and OneNote being locked in a proprietary format (OneNote has corrupted on me in the past and Evernote became over stuffed as it was a backup of Instapaper saved items making it unsearchable and slow).
I love the beauty of Craft, but my deep appreciation of distinctly addressable files, which I can also open in other apps and use their special magic, have me loving Obsidian. I can start a markdown note in Drafts on my phone, save it to my folder in Dropbox that is my top folder (with one nested in it) that Obsidian sees as its Vault, Open it in Obsidian add to it and edit it, then want to turn it into something longer, so open it in IA Writer for a longer more polished draft and save it, then drag the proxy icon for the file in IA Writer to Marked2 for some review and then preview HTML to copy it and crop that in my blogging tool (Squarespace or my personally hand built one from 2001 / 2002).
Essentially all one file, but through “small apps loosely joined” I can take a common document type and get the best functionality out of a few different apps for different purposes and still have the same standard file in the end.
Obsidian, but also the @MacSparky’s “Contextual Computing” (I had to dig it out as other circles I run in call it linked knowledge and others connected knowledge) with how Drafts, DevonThink, Obsidian, and OmniFocus work together.
I have been using Drafts for years, but in the last 6 months mostly using it for on the go quite note capture that drops into Dropbox where Obsidian has its Vault (my old NValt directories I moved there), and my DevonThink indexes those same two nested folders in Dropbox. I haven’t started the cross linking, but I have been using DevonThink since 2005 and I have a ton of objects in there that I reference in research, expert witness work, examples, and references (and so much more).
A Field Guide to take me farther would be great.
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Really interesting to hear about Obsidian, sounds like a great tool I want to explore. I have previously used a similar tool called TiddlyWiki which creates a personal linked wiki of all your notes. I have a large notebook in TiddlyWiki. Does anybody know an easy way I could convert my TiddlyWiki to import it into Obsidian?
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I stand corrected on a comment I made earlier. One can drag an Apple Mail message to Obsidian to create a link to that message. However, I find no way to send a list of action items from Obsidian to OF like I can in both Drafts and Craft. This is not nearly as efficient as in Drafts or Craft.
The other thing I noticed is that Obsidian doesn’t seem to continue creating a list of tasks using [ ]. Instead, I have to keep typing [ ] on each subsequent line to create the next task.
Am I missing something?
Obsidian does not support Services or Extensions. Craft appears to have developed its own scripted alternative to Extensions.
After this episode I decided to give Obsidian a whirl, but I’ve ended up returning to using Craft after a few days of playing around.
I love Craft’s user interface, and wasn’t impressed by Obsidian’s. Craft feels more like a Mac app. I also view all my notes on an iPad while writing on a Mac, and therefore this would have totally broken my preferred workflow.
I just don’t need the additional features. I use notes for academic writing, and I don’t have clients or need to take extensive notes all the time.
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This shouldn’t be the case, but it’s hard to guess what’s going on. You might want to post about this over on Obsidian’s forum (in order to avoid having a very specific back and forth on it here!)
Craft is a native app (Catalyst, to be precise, with a very smart and in-depth use of the APIs). Obsidian is the opposite - it’s Electron.
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How is it complete in the project note when you mark it as done in the daily notes? How do you include the block in both notes?
Or is this the answer to my question?
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(Edit: clarified the edit/preview distinction of blocks.)
If I have a task like…
- [ ] Reply to Mitch
…and I add it as an embedded block to my daily note, I get something like the following in my daily note’s raw text…
## Journal
- ![[⧸△ Run a reading group on Knowledge Architectures by Bedford#^3at77dg]]
…where ![[some text#^blockid]] is a transcluded block. It looks like the following in Preview…
## Journal
- <- [ ] Reply to Mitch>
…where the angle brackets indicate a transcluded block (purely for the purposes of this explanation).
I can check that checkbox on either the daily note or the project note. It’s a transclusion, so the status is changed everywhere either way.
Demo:
(I use the Day Planner plugin for time blocking, hence the - [ ] 10:00 line the task block is anchored to in the daily note. This differentiates the notion of “work on this thing at 10:00” from “this thing is complete”, for me, but you could also just embed task blocks on their own line as desired.)
And yes, I find Review’s “review this block” command to be the easiest way to add a task from anywhere to your daily notes.
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Good idea, I will IF I decide to explore Obsidian more but at the moment, I’m still vacillating some between Drafts and Craft as my primary note taking app. My notes are exclusively meeting/project related. My primary need is to be able to send a list of to-do’s to OF and the entire note to DT without the need to constantly copy/paste. I’ve run into problems accomplishing this well with Actions in Drafts but I have figured how to get this work well using Craft.
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You add the task to your project note, and then switch to the Daily note and transclude it? Or is that process automated so you only have to touch one note?
I’m not looking at this so much for task management – I use Things for that – as for “have dones.” Marking milestones and status in a project. “This article is being reviewed by my editor,” and so on.
Also, do you use Obsidian as your task manager, rather than a dedicated task manager? That’s hardcore!
Thanks for this topic. It couldn’t have come at a better time, although my situation is admittedly not a usual one. Obsidian works well on PCs, and my work is transitioning from Office to Google. Google’s got nothing close to One Note, so Obsidian will fill this gap very nicely. Been playing with it for a couple days, and loving it. I think for the Mac though, I’ll still stick to Notes. 
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Sorry, I should’ve just posted a full demo including Review’s functionality. You can use Review to add blocks from anywhere to your daily notes using natural language. No need to touch the daily note—I’m just showing it here for demonstration purposes.
Voila:
OmniFocus was my last task manager. I haven’t used it since late 2019, though. I wanted it to do a variety of things that the data structure simply didn’t provide for. At that time, I started to manage tasks across my notes using DEVONthink. That approach was absurd and kludgy, so I started toying with the idea of making my own markdown-based task management app… then Obsidian came along! Haven’t looked back since.
I have more to say on this that I’m planning on writing up (I find myself saying that a lot lately). For now I’ll excerpt from something I shared a while back on the Obsidian Discord:
Conventional task management can often be about managing a representation of the work you have to do, not about managing the work itself.
When I used OmniFocus/Things/Todoist/etc., I spent a lot of energy trying to line up high-quality lists of tasks and projects. Ultimately, though, those lists are metadata about the work. That energy should’ve gone into the work itself.
With this approach, I have found my mindset has changed. The representation of the work only matters insofar as it helps me do the work. So, now, my notes are where the work happens, and I keep tasks in those, as close as possible to where the work is happening.
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Interesting. I have now reviewed the Review plugin (so to speak). It looks useful for Daily Notes. I wonder if there’s some easy way to do something Review-like for ANY target note?
Right now I want to update status in three places, which is a lot: A project dashboard, an overall dashboard for Obsidian as a whole, and the appropriate daily note. (A “dashboard” is what I call an index, table of contents, or MoC).
Seems like I can do that by posting the status update into Project dashboard, then transcluding that status update in the daily note.
The main Dashboard would simply be links or transclusions to individual project dashboards.
Why do I need all those fussy status updates? Well, just a few minutes ago a colleague asked me for as status update on a project I was done with in November. I was able to get her an answer in less than a minute. This is not an uncommon event.
Ryan, do you use Folders much, by the way? Right now I use one folder per project, creating a half-dozen projects monthly, with corresponding Tag Groups in DT. I’m thinking I might want to get with the cool kids and ditch folders in favor of tags or Dashboard notes with backlinks or some other modern thing. But then I think – why bother?