Show me all open Work tasks in Obsidian
My Obsidian vault is "all-in-one", personally I don't like switching between multiple vaults for work and private stuff, and I organize it in a way to keep things separated in one vault. Multiple templates I'm using automatically generate Tasks in my vault, therefore I need a convenient way to see open work tasks. This blog posting describes the approach I'm using.
In my vault I have a folder "Work", that's where all the work stuff lives, obviously. In this folder is a note named "Open Work Tasks". Here's the note, which is mostly DataView queries.
## Open Work Tasks
```dataview
TABLE WITHOUT ID regexreplace(Tasks.text, "\[.*$", "") AS Task, choice(Tasks.completed, "🟢", "🔴") AS Status, file.link AS "File"
FROM "Work"
FLATTEN file.tasks AS Tasks
WHERE file.tasks AND !Tasks.completed AND Tasks.text != ""
```
### Grouped list
```dataview
TASK
FROM "Work"
WHERE !completed AND text != ""
GROUP BY section
```
### Dates for Tasks
[Documentation](https://publish.obsidian.md/tasks/Getting+Started/Dates)
- 📅 Due Date
- ⏳ Scheduled Date
- 🛫 Start Date
- ➕ Created Date
- ✅ Done Date
### Tasks with invalid dates
```tasks
(created date is invalid) OR (done date is invalid) OR (due date is invalid) OR (scheduled date is invalid) OR (start date is invalid)
```
Let's go over this in detail:
Open Work Tasks
This DataView lists all open tasks, which have a text. Part of the templates is a "ready-to-go" task without text in the "Decisions" section, but such tasks are not listed here.
The query is limited to the "Work" folder, therefore excluding all other tasks somewhere else in the vault.
This list is flattened, which means that it shows all tasks, not grouped, no matter where in the vault under "Work". That's helpful to see where I still have work to do. At some point I may integrate this into Todoist, but so far it works well for me.
Grouped list
This list shows the same entries as the previous list, but groups the entries by source file. This gives me an idea if I have some "heavy work" open where multiple tasks require my attention for the same issue.
Dates for Tasks
This section is mostly documentation (for me). It helps me to quickly remember how to do all the different date forms the Task plugin can do.
Tasks with invalid dates
This last section is supposed to be empty at all times. It's simply a query which shows all Task entries (this time in the entire vault) which have invalid dates. The kind of mistakes which can happen when adding dates in free text form.
Summary
I try to work on open tasks as soon as possible, which means that I rarely have more than a few tasks open here - in contrary to my todo list in Todoist, which is quite large, but managed in a different way.
The two DataView queries provide me all the information I need to quickly find all remaining open Work tasks.
Image
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash