Comment by shepherdjerred | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shepherdjerred | Hacker News Reader

I've done something like this for a year or two with a single Markdown document + Obsidian. I call it my "working set" where I write down my TODO list. I have a similar document for my personal life when I have a lot going on or when I'm trying to be particularly productive.

At the end of the day I make an entry for the next day carrying over what I didn't finish. If something has been carried over for too long (e.g. something that I'd like to do but isn't required) then I just remove it. Usually I might have 3-4 tasks each day, though when I first joined my most recent company my list was something like 10-20 small tasks for a couple of weeks.

If I have larger investigations I'll always write it down in a separate Markdown document so that my working set doesn't grow too large.

It's a very low overhead way to do task tracking, and there are all of the benefits listed in the parent article. I don't think I'd ever make this publically available though.

I do something somewhat similar which has evolved for myself and in part for my team. What follows is heavily abridged in the interest of time.

I use Obsidian as follows:

1. Daily log in bullet-point format. Title in YYYY-MM-DD format. Bottom of log has [[YYYY-MM-DD]] with tomorrow’s date.

If I get into a task that starts to get a bit ‘chatty’ and/or would benefit from capturing stdin/stdout/stderr snippets, I’ll use the [[blah]] trick and dump it there.

If a particular priority task didn’t get tended to, I copy that into tomorrow’s daily before stepping afk for the day.

Gets shared with manager, etc.

2. Weekly summary using the ![[Week ending YYYY-MM-DD]] embedded view Obsidian feature in my daily log page. For that at-a-glance warm fuzzies. This boils down to:

- retrospective - highs - lows - 1:1 notes - incoming week’s tasks/priorities

I use this page for my 1:1’s of course. I’ve only very recently started copying the retrospective to my manager via Slack to ensure he’s got the goods.

I prep my incoming week with a new weekly summary, and pre-populate the bare bones for the daily notes.

I use the Obsidian Task plugin, so if I had an important, low-urgency idea at the end of the week instead of rolling it over I will give it a START or DUE date. Then I use the task query to keep an eye on when to reconsider or finish things.

This works a lot better for me, instead of copying over more and more ideas each day, or building a write-only SOMEDAY.md

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