Now don’t knock me over, but I am swithering (yes, it’s a word) about my task management system. I’ve been in Omnifocus for years (thanks MacSparky) but find it overwhelming, I own Things 3, & I’m playing with an obsidian/claude only and a claude/todoist (these two running in parallel at the moment which is eating tokens).
I want:
the most important thing is not to be overwhelmed. I work what is effectively full time as a locum GP. That’s not what’s in my task manager/claude - except the organisational side. I have a lot of stuff with home/play/work stuff. I find it really hard to settle without checking everything else.
to be able to check off tasks visually on my phone
to use claude to surface what needs to be done in a timely manner & to run reviews & generally organise the system. (but not do his own thing)
What are you running?
How do you integrate Claude with your to-do system?
Not after your perfect solution, but keen to hear what you are doing the pros & cons.
Thank you!
I use the TaskNotes plugin inside Obsidian and as mentioned in another thread,
TaskForge works with TaskNotes or the more common Obsidian Tasks app.
TaskNotes is a note-per-task system so like MacSparky’s RAFG system but more sophisticated (eg recurring tasks). Claude can read and write my TaskNotes, there is a MCP but I don’t use it.
I also use Due on my phone for reminders and TickTick for a lot of recurring stuff that I don’t need to clutter my vault with and certainly doesn’t need Claude’s involvement.
Used Omnifocus for years, then used Todoist for a couple of years. I have settled on Reminders. Few more clicks but does what I want, syncs with BusyCal. Everyone’s needs differ.
Another recovering OmniFocus addict. Some days I spent more time futzing (a type of swithering) with OF to make it just so. Then I watched Sparky’s Reminders Field Guide (part of the Productivity Suite Field Guide), and immediately went cold turkey on OF. It’s been more than a year, and I’ve never looked back.
Does what @Tatters wants. The path for Claude to see the reminders is via the Fantastical MCP. My key Reminders list syncs with Fantastical.
Obsidian and the Tasks Plug-in
I’ve listened to MacSparky’s reason why not to use that plug-in (single major developer etc. etc. etc.) BUT I also have forked it and it is the one thing that handles my rather complex way of working.
I have several catch-all notes that collect tasks in a general way. For projects I use a base project note that gathers all tasks related to that project, and other info in one place so I can easily switch to working by project vs by context as necessary. Often when a project has project specific files I gather them into a folder. When the project is completed the note (or the whole folder) goes into my archive folder so I don’t lose the history. I tag tasks with context (GTD style) and have a curated set of nested tags that do that for me. I require keeping a history of finished tasks with their finished date.
I have available projects/tasks that I swap on a quarterly basis so I always have a LOT more things that I could be working on than I can actually do in any given day week and sometimes even season. But it works for me. I typically have around 400 individual concrete doable tasks available to me and am typically running with about 100 projects usually about half one-off and half recurring multi-task things I do regularly.
I work on my iPhone from my Dashboard note that has all my available tasks with a nice clean checkbox to mark them done sorted by context.
I do not currently use Claude to integrate with it at all. I want to stay in charge of my projects and tasks. However, I do now have a context for Claude of individual tasks where I can use Claude to help me finish it. So for your last item I can’t help at all.