no more todo app
I was distracted from my usual week note post on Sunday as I discovered the concept of ‘One Big Text File’. (This was a result of browsing Bear Blogs, but sorry I can’t remember which blog it was). I go seriously lost in this. I am already enamoured of .md and Obsidian, and this just really got my mind going. I will post my thoughts on this one later.
For now, in my reading around about OBTF I also spotted this article, which in reading a little section called ‘Prerequisite’ my mind was shifted.
Some background first. I have been using, and enjoying, Tick Tick for a little while (I also flip flop between todos on paper and digital on the odd occasion). I am also a firm believer in forcing myself to assign a ‘to do’ date on all tasks, to avoid entries languishing in a someday-maybe state (I have another way to save those). Because of this I have found recently that I practically live in the calendar, 2-week view of Tick Tick: dragging tasks between days as needed. I have to use Outlook at work, but there isn’t a great way to sync between the two.
So I was ripe for that little nudge from Jeff: why don’t I just put these tasks in Outlook's calendar? I can use the ‘all day’ entry section to create tasks. I could then drag as needed—even pulling them into the day to block time out if I want! I made the background calendar colour a contrast to my categorised ‘normal’ events, so the tasks really pop visually. I then paste them into my OBTF as markdown tasks.
Bonus for me is that I already use Power Automate to spit out my daily agenda as a markdown format list, to paste in Obsidian. So all I need to do is prefix each task in Outlook with [ ] so that it comes through as a task. Voila!
Instead of a calendar and todo app, I now just have a calendar (Obsidian is just my log in this case). This makes sense as conceptually, there is little difference between an event and a dated task. Yes, I get inordinately excited about things like this :-)