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💡 The Big Idea: I Built a Custom System for Keeping Tabs on Collaborative Tasks in Obsidian

If you work with a team, you already know that effective task management requires more than just getting your stuff done.

For years, this has been a pain point for me. I don’t really want to track everyone else’s tasks in my system, but I do need to check in with people occasionally and make sure that things are moving along or else I end up being the one getting in trouble at the end.

So, in this newsletter, I want to share a cool Obsidian workflow I’ve created that can help you make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

How to Handle Tasks That Involve Others

There are a couple of different buckets tasks that involve others can fall into for me:

1. Tasks that I’m waiting for someone to do something before I can take action
2. Tasks that lack clarity and require a conversation before I can move forward
3. Tasks that are assigned to someone else that I need to follow up on

The first one is the classic Waiting For context. These are tasks where I am literally stuck until someone else does something. In my Obsidian task management system, these tasks have a #waiting tag.

The second one doesn’t require a deliverable from someone, but I do need to talk to them and get some answers before I can move the task forward. I’m still stuck on these tasks, but the next step is simply to talk to the person involved. These tasks get a #discuss tag.

Both of these kinds of tasks can be visualized on my Task Dashboard Obsidian Canvas file:

The third kind of task (ones that are actually assigned to someone else) doesn’t often make its way into my system. But every once in a while, I’ll add a task like this if it’s a really important part of a big project just so I can bug them about it when I see them in a meeting. For this, I’ll usually link the actual task in our shared task platform (i.e., Notion) and include an internal link to the person involved with double brackets.

That link to the Person Note is important, so let’s look at that next.

The Foundation: The Person Note

As I thought about how I might be able to leverage the connections to the Person Note in Obsidian, I realized that if I gave the person a tag, then it would open up a world of possibilities. So, I added a tag to the top of the Person Note that I could combine with other tags to create a bunch of different workflows tied to the Person Note (i.e. for John Smith I used the tag #john).

By adding this tag, I could now show on the Person Note:

1. All of the tasks where I was waiting for them to deliver something
2. All of the tasks where I needed to discuss something with them
3. All of the tasks that were assigned to them that I wanted to keep tabs on

I wrapped all of these inside of custom callouts using specific task queries.

Here’s what it looks like (from LifeHQ):

But at this point, you’re probably wondering about the queries I used 😉 Here they are.

The To Discuss with John query:

The Waiting for John query:

The Assigned to John query:

There's also a section below the callouts that uses a Dataview query to show all of the meeting notes I had taken where John had been an attendee:

Here’s the Dataview query for the links to the meeting notes where John was listed as an attendee (tagged in the Attendees property):

Then, finally, at the bottom, I can add additional notes that I want to associate with John. This makes the Person Note kind of like a CRM, but the real value is that whenever I’m going into a meeting with John, I can just pull up his Person Note and see what’s in the To Discuss with John list.

Creating a Template

As you can see, there’s a lot of manual updating that needs to happen each time I create a new Person Note using these queries.

Fortunately, the QuickAdd plugin makes it easy to add these from scratch.

Whenever I want to create a new Person Note, I can use a QuickAdd command to add specific text to a template.

Here’s the workflow:

• I trigger the New Contact command from the Command Palette
• QuickAdd shows me prompts where I type in the person’s first name, last name, and the tag I want to use
• The file gets created in the People folder, and those tokens are used to instantly create all of the queries

This not only is more efficient, but it also makes sure that I don’t mistype something when editing the queries.

Person Note Workflows

There are lots of ways that you can use these queries:

• As mentioned above, you can open the Person Note before heading into a meeting to make sure you get your questions answered on your To Discuss list
• You can quickly see where you’re stuck by someone before meeting a regularly scheduled 1-on-1
• You can instantly find all the project notes associated with the team meetings where both you and the other person were attendees

Having all of this tied to the Person Note opens up so many new workflows that make it easy to keep tabs on things where others are involved.

I’m really happy with all the uses I’m finding for the Person Note in Obsidian. If you need to keep tabs on things that aren’t assigned to you, I highly recommend you give this a shot.

I’m working on a YouTube video right now, which will show this in action and show you exactly how to build it better than I can in an email. But if you want to give it a shot yourself, I've included all the codes here, and here's a link to the Contact template file.

And if you prefer a done-for-you version of this, check out LifeHQ 😉 All of the commands are pre-built, so you can just start using the workflows without having to build them from scratch.

🎉 Last Call for the Practical PKM Cohort

The Practical PKM Cohort kicks off in a few hours! If you could use some help crafting a custom PKM system to handle whatever life throws at you, it's not too late to join. The first session kicks off TODAY at 1pm CT (2pm ET, 11am PT).

This is the last chance to join the cohort time around, and everyone who does will also receive:

• 1 year of access to The Library, my private PKM community ($500 value)
• Access to ALL of my video courses ($485 value)
• A complimentary copy of LifeHQ ($297 value)

As a LifeHQ customer, remember that you can apply the full list price toward joining this cohort ($297), making it $700 instead of $997. Just use the coupon code PKMUPGRADE at checkout.

I'll be pretty busy putting the finishing touches on the first presentation this morning, but if you have any last-minute questions, just reply to this email and I'll do my best to answer them in time 😉

😎 Something Cool: System-Level Obsidian Notifications on Android

One of the drawbacks of using Obsidian for all of my personal tasks & project management is that I can no longer get system-level notifications. I don’t actually mind this (I time-block my important tasks at the beginning of the day and actually don’t want to receive task notifications on my phone), but I know many people who rely on these mobile notifications.

Well, recently I saw a very interesting app appear in the Obsidian Discord called Notifian that actually adds system-level notifications from your Obsidian tasks. Full disclosure: This isn’t for me. One, I don’t have an Android device where I could even install this. But two, it seems to use a specific property value which would require using individual notes as tasks.

I do know a lot of people who do task management in Obsidian that way, though, and if you’re one of them, this might be for you. I do think it’s a pretty cool idea, and I’m interested to see where this goes.

If they ever add support for the Obsidian Tasks plugin, it might be enough to get me to switch to Android 😉

📚 Book Notes: Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charles Munger

I just finished reading the Stripe Press version of Poor Charlie's Almanack (edited by Peter Kaufman) for Bookworm (we're recording today after the first Practical PKM session because I got sick again last week 😞), and this is a fascinating book. Charles Munger was Warren Buffett's right-hand man at Berkshire Hathaway, and this is basically a book of all his business wisdom. It's a really interesting read, and there's a very cool online version of the book that you can view for free here.

And if you want to download my notes for this book, click here.

— Mike Schmitz