In het past weeks I struggled to get to action. I didn’t have the sense that I was in the pilot seat. Too many little things budding in, not being able to get started on bigger things, and no sense of overview. Or rather, a too overwhelming overview, and no easy way for myself to bring the scope of that view down to something manageable for the day.

I have about 35 areas of activity, this includes projects, general tasks, both business, volunteer work and personal. For each of those 35 or so activities I keep a running list of things to do. Some lists have a few items, others have a few dozen. If on average they hold 10 tasks each, it means a tasklist of 300 to 400 items to choose from. That makes for an overwhelming overview. It gets better if I dive into the scope of a specific project or activity area, but then I don’t see the small things I can do to keep the other activities rolling. When I was still using Things I had the same effect, so this isn’t something particular to my current use of Obsidian for tasks.

The result has been that, because the overall list is too overwhelming, I haven’t been using it much. Which means I have even less sense of overview or being on top of my stuff.

In an attempt to regain that sense, I’m now trying to each morning go through the entire list and pick a handful of things for the day. That small curated list has a more manageable scope, without being limited to a single activity.

I don’t want to copy tasks from one place to another. I want them to stay on their respective project or activity list, but marked and summarised on my daily list. I’m aware there are various task oriented plugins for Obsidian, but they will prescribe me a certain mode of working, and it isn’t certain that in their absence the same information will be as usable / findable (a type of functional lock-in or dependency I always want to avoid)

What I came up with is I mark every task I choose for the day with ‘t::’, in whichever line of whichever file I want. This can be an existing tasklist, but I can do the same while making meeting notes, to quickly mark something as a task resulting from the meeting. The Dataview plugin I already use sees ‘t::’ as an inline datafield and is able to extract them into a list using the following brief piece of code:

```dataview
TABLE t as Vandaag
WHERE t
SORT File asc

I display that at the top of my daily note. It allows me to quickly jump into a task list or other note to delete it when done, and to copy it over into my daily note in the ‘done’ list.

In the coming days I will test if this improves my days and activities.

A brief list of selected tasks from other files. Also note that at the top t:: is mentioned inline twice, and both show up as task items in the list.