I manage my digital and analog obsessions in tandem. The BaronFig Squire is a nice pen. You might also try index cards; Walmart’s Heavy Weight cards are wicked cheap, and handle fountain pen ink, even, reasonably well.
I have my long-term project management type stuff in apps (Scrivener and Bear, thinking about using Obsidian( but transfer the stuff for current tasks to paper.
I have both Reminders and Microsoft To-Do set to sync with Microsoft 365 so I move between them.
You do know there are now significant numbers of members in this forum shaking with cold sweats!
When I hung up the law practice, I thought I may be able to find an alternative to OmniFocus. I’ve tried several so far and I still like OmniFocus best.
I just finished a nearly month long Obsidian experiment. I made a video about it in The MacSparky Labs. Here’s a link for the sake of the folks in this thread. Obsidian is pretty good, but also felt a little too tenuous for me.
Please enjoy the link, but don’t publish it elsewhere.
I have moved away from task management. I tend to put things in reminders and notes. I get things done generally…no rush though…at my own pace…
Like others above, I’ve been playing with Obsidian for tasks.
I’ve found it so far to be quite helpful, in part it reduces the movement of tasks from my meeting notes in to a separate program afterwards but a big plus has been the cross platform nature of it, as it’ll work on my work Windows laptop without anything else needed, so that works well.
I was perhaps missing reminders, but on the other hand, that’s forcing me to do my weekly and daily reviews, which I wasn’t doing before when the tasks were in another program.
I’ll certainly be continuing to give it a go.
This is one of my biggest issues with Obsidian. I need a task manager for alerting me to critical due dates, repeating reminders, etc. The missing element for me is the inability to share a task in Obsidian with Reminders or other task manager. I don’t want to manage my tasks in Obsidian. I want to “note” the tasks there and then select and send them to the task manager for actual processing. I can do this easily in Notes and Craft but haven’t figured out how to do so in Obsidian.
I’d love to have this issue resolved because at that point, I’d seriously consider putting all of my work and personal notes in Obsidian.
I use Apple Reminders and the PARA method in Obsidian (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive).
Anything under Projects (tasks with a deadline) gets a Reminders entry, and as I check things off I (manually) move the notes to Archive. Not all Reminders have a Projects note though, some work just fine as one-liners.
I don’t see the need to install and depend on an Obsidian plugin maintained by one person in their spare time to manage tasks when I have so many well-made todo apps at my disposal. To quote the Unix philosophy, “Make each program do one thing well”.
I assume you do this as a manual process by which I mean you copy/paste each task into Reminders and I assume you also copy the Obsidian URL link into Reminders, is that correct? It certainly works but I’d like a more efficient method.
If you’ve discovered a better way I’d love to know! 
So by tasks I mean projects, instead of individual steps, and then I usually have a checklist section in my notes for that project. I don’t add Obsidian links, though that’s a good idea but would definitely get tedious.
Example: I’m working on projectName. projectName is a page with a checklist and notes under Projects in Obsidian, and might expand to a folder later depending on how big it gets. I add projectName (Title and deadline, so projectName 6/10/22) to Reminders, and set a due date of Today. Then it lives in the Today view every day (and I get reminded in my morning summary from Reminders) until I complete the project.
At the start of each day, I reorder reminders in Today based on what I need to prioritize, which includes both Projects and one-liners (one-liners are chores or other things that don’t need an Obsidian page). Some get pushed to the next day or week.
I think Mark Forster’s Final Version Perfected is unbeatable. I keep returning to it.
It’s simple and gets you working in minutes.
I recently bought a TWSBI Eco Fountain pen with a fine nib and it’s an absolute joy to use. It’s making me look for more stuff to write just so I can use it.
Got it, thanks!
20……
I’ve been retired for 6 years and my only non-repetitive projects are writing technical books. I’ve found Scrivener has all I need for managing those tasks.
Beyond that I’ve got 76 repetitive tasks that I keep in OmniFocus. It’s really overkill as I only need the task to show up when due, and then when I’ve checked it off it reappears at the appropriate later date.
Unfortunately Reminders doesn’t appear to have that capability, otherwise I’d drop OmniFocus for it in a heartbeat. That would be one less program to have to deal with.
Historically it was paper and pencil, actually a DayTimer. When I got a Palm Pilot there was an app called Redo that paired with the built-in Todo (which was a Reminder-like app). ReDo’s sole function was to schedule the next event repeat.
A simple need which doesn’t need a complex (or subscription) solution.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, Reminders does this easily. I create a recurring task with an initial due date. I’ll set the recurrence based on the options shown below in the sample task. I can create the task to recur based on the pre-defined options shown or select “Custom” and create my own. The task appears in Today on the day it is due.
Selecting “Custom” gives me these options:
I agree, it’s pretty bullet proof, but I would call it more a workflow approach than an app (not that you were calling it an app). I think the workflow has to come first, then the app facilitates that flow. Trying an app to then shoehorn a workflow into it is a fool’s errand! (I know, I’ve been that fool! 
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This was a very fast “add to Instapaper” for me, thanks!
I’m currently doing this via a plug-in from macstories called Shortcuts Launcher and a second plug-in called Advanced URI.
It grabs the selection (or the current paragraph if nothing is selected) and looks for a block ID. If there’s a block ID on it, it will pass the link to that block to the shortcut. If not, it will pass the link to the note itself.
Then shortcuts will make a to-do (I’m doing this in Things) that will have the selected text/current paragraph in the notes field along with a link to the note/block.
The beauty of doing this via Shortcuts Launcher is that I can trigger this automation on any Apple Device, Mac, iPad or iPhone.
I guess this workflow can be easily recreated for Reminders.
This looks great! It takes into account psychological readiness which few other systems do and task managers cannot. Thanks for sharing.
It reinforces the need to have a robust methodology and not just expect an application to address all issues. Task managers can be efficient, but whether they are also good for your own well-being is not always clear. They can treat you like a machine doing one task after another, regardless of your mental state. I used to use Asana at work and the ever growing pile of tasks was demotivating and stressful. But it was technically efficient.
Today I pick my favourite three tasks that Reminders throws up and write them on a post it note. Maybe an even simpler system like this would allow some of those tasks that never seem to reach the top of Reminders list but I’d quite like to do to finally get done!
I aways come back to Omnifocus, but for most recurring tasks i started using Due, i ‘like’ the persistent reminders. On iOS i use Omnifocus 4 testflight. I capture using Drafts or paper.
I like Things, but for me the prioritises design over function too much, especially on macOS.
For work i’m in the Microsoft 365 world, tasks arrive in many forms… DevOps, MS Planner, SharePoint lists… in some projects or teams i use an automation workflow in MS Power Automate to mail to Omnifocus when a task has assigned to me.
