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Moving Back From Obsidian Tasks to Things App

#Obsidian, #Productivity

After a few months with Obsidian tasks, I returned to the Things App.

In general, on MacOS Obsidian Tasks are pretty good. But when I started to use it on iPad and iPhone it pissed me off. Because of the iCloud sync, my task lists were often getting messed up causing reloading loops of Obsidian. I just couldn't do my productivity porn well enough on my ultimate productivity porn devices, which made me feel sad. I also didn't find a convenient way to sync Obsidian with my Apple Calendar.

All this was making such a boring task as task management unbearable and I decided to move back to Things.

While actively using Obsidian for both notes and task management I noticed a few things.

  1. I noticed that I almost never mix tasks & notes in Obsidian. 99% of the time, they coexist like Jira & Confluence: they are neighbors, but the apartments are separate.

  2. Linking between notes and tasks is also rare. I sometimes link task → project's materials. In practice, it's barely useful (except for navigation purposes) because it links to the entire note, which likely contains much more info than required for a particular task. I doubt that linking Note → Task from another file is even possible in Obsidian. So it turned out that keeping tasks very close to notes doesn't bring any real benefits to me except that I don't switch context jumping from one app to another.

  3. I often kept the list of todos opened as a sidecar. So, putting a small Things App window in a split screen mode doesn't even make much difference from the UI standpoint. But. It makes a HUGE difference from the UX standpoint. Hotkeys on Mac + native apps for iPad/iPhone apps are kings.

So what I'm doing now? I moved tasks back to the Things App and now I'm using it as a sidecar for my Obsidian app via split screen.

Since my Obsidian is using Things Theme they look almost like a single app:

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