If you're here, then you have, like me, at least partially moved into the world of digital note-taking, and with digital notes comes better tools for search.

So wouldn't it be great if you could just down your tasks wherever you happen to be and still have them consolidated and shown to you on the date that they're due?

Well, for these kinds of questions in Obsidian, there's usually the same answer.

There's a plugin for that.

Or three.

Hi, I'm Nicole van der Hoeven, and on this channel, I talk about how I min-max my life and the different tools that I use to do that.

In this video, I'm talking about Obsidian and, in particular, three plugins that you'll need to have installed and enabled to go on with the rest of the setup.

Those three plugins are Daily Notes, Templates, and Data View.

Let's get started.

So I already have all three of those plugins installed, but make sure that they're enabled as well.

You'll know that they're enabled if you see them in the settings here, like there's Daily Notes, and there's Data View, and there's Templates.

And by the way, I'm talking here about Templates, the core plugin, and not Templater, the community plugin.

They do some of the same things, but in this one, I'm talking about Templates as the core plugin that comes with Obsidian, and you just have to enable it in the core plugin section here.

First, create a folder called Templates, and then set that folder as the default templates folder.

Now, if you don't do any of the setup, you're going to just be presented with a Daily Note for every day that you open Obsidian.

Now, that on its own is usable, but I like to have a little bit more to look at than just a blank screen.

So we're going to create a template for it.

Before we do that, though, we're going to go into Templates and make sure we say what folder the templates are going to be held in.

So in this case, I'm going to say Templates.

I don't actually have that folder yet, so if we look here, I only have these four folders.

This is a test vault, and so I still need to create something in that folder.

Now, you could go and click New Folder here.

That'll work too, but I'm just going to go Command-O here and do Templates and then Daily because I'm trying to create the template for a Daily Note.

Step two is creating a daily template.

The title of this template is called Daily, but the title of the Daily Note that we're going to apply it on is going to be in this format, right?

So that's fine.

I'll just use that as the title since it's already the date, and I'm going to do two brackets, two squiggly brackets.

That's a special Obsidian variable, and I'm just going to put Title, and then maybe I'll have Tasks to Today here and another one that says Log, where I'm actually going to be writing down most of my thoughts.

So this is a template, but how do we make sure that Daily Notes get this template from now on?

Step three is setting the Daily Notes plugin to use the daily template by default.

So to do that, go to Settings and then Daily Notes, and then here in Template File Location, let's go ahead and select that one that we just created and then exit out of that.

Now, you may be wondering why this template hasn't been applied to this note yet.

That's because it already existed before we told Obsidian that we wanted every new Daily Note to have this that's Command-P.

And by the way, you can also set up a keyboard shortcut for this in Hotkeys.

I've done that in my personal vault.

So then click Enter, and normally it would ask you which template you want to apply.

But in this case, we only have the one template, so it just pulled that in automatically.

So you'll see that it automatically changed this Heading 1 to the title of this note.

You can in the template specify variables that then take the current value when they're applied.

So just to see how Daily Notes will look from now on, let's go over to the Calendar plugin here.

You don't really need this for the setup.

This is just so that I can show you what it's going to look like.

Let me exit out of this.

Now from the Calendar plugin, if I just want to create a note from yesterday, it's telling me that that note doesn't exist because I didn't use this vault yesterday.

So I'm going to go ahead and click Create, and we'll see that it automatically pulled in the template that we created, as it will from now on.

Step four is to create tasks in different notes wherever you happen to be, using a checkbox and then tagging it with a due date.

So let's say we were in a meeting.

So this is a meeting note, and I'll say Project X Update Week 1.

I just changed the theme because I realized that checkboxes don't show up well in the previous theme.

Let's say we're in a meeting, typing out meeting notes, and suddenly there's a task that we need to do.

By the way, that was just done by hitting Command-Enter.

You can also type this out yourself by doing a dash, space, and then a pair brackets with a space inside it.

Or Command-Enter will work as well.

And let's say check in with the app team to see if they have blockers.

This time though, I'm also going to add a due date to it.

So I'm going to type April 11th.

So I don't have a daily note for this yet, but that's fine.

I'm going to add a task in here too.

This is a task from a daily note, and we'll also mark it April 11th.

Step five is copying the data view query into the daily notes template.

So if we want to be able to pull in all of the tasks that are due by a certain date, then data view is actually a really good way to do that.

So I'm just going to do the data view query here, and then we can worry about where it should go later.

So that's three block takes, and I'll do data view JS this time.

In my last video, I talked about data view, but not so much about data view JS.

Let me know if there are other things that you'd like to do with data view JS.

This is just one use case for it.

So I'm going to be typing out some JavaScript here.

Bear with me.

I know not everybody is a developer, but I'm going to put this exact code snippet in the description box below.

So you can just copy it and paste it without really needing to know how it works exactly.

So then, so first I'm going to create a task list of all the pages that have tasks, but only the ones where the task is not completed, and where the text of the task includes the date.

Now for this one, since we already know that we need to copy it and hard code that, so April 11th, I'm going to enter out of this and we should see both of those tasks.

Looks like data view JS queries are disabled.

This is really good because then I can show you that you also need to do that.

Go into data view settings here and click enable JavaScript queries.

Exit out of that, and we'll go here and then enter again.

And now the two tasks are being dynamically fetched by this data view query.

A cool thing is if you take a task from here, so this one is the task up here on this daily note.

If I click on it here, then it gets checked off and it disappears from the data view query as well, because we only said that we wanted to see uncompleted tasks.

So I'll untick that just so it comes back.

Now the problem is we hard coded this date and we wouldn't want to have to do that every day, but that's exactly what templates are good for.

So instead of this date here, I'm now just going to include the date.

So before we did the title right as the variable, but now we're just going to do the date and it has to be in a specific format.

So that's four digits for the year, two for the month, and two for the day, which matches up with how daily notes are done.

Now I'm going to copy this entire thing and go back to the I'm going to paste that query.

Now if we exit out of this, there won't be anything there because we don't actually have any tasks that have this string, but that's okay.

This is just a template and we're going to be applying it to a daily note.

So let's go back to calendar here and go back to April 11th, because that's the date that we had all of these tasks.

And what we want is to go to have the daily note template populated with the title and with the tasks that were due on April 11th.

So let me click on that.

It'll ask me to create the new note, create, and the two tasks are already automatically pulled in.

The cool thing is is that once you set this up, you don't have to do any of it again.

You can put check boxes wherever you happen to be and then add the date as the due date and every daily note you're going to be presented with a list of all of the tasks that you need to get done that day.

Let me admit something though.

This approach works and I've helped a couple of friends set it up, but personally if I have a task that is either date or time sensitive, then I prefer to put it on a calendar using a smart calendar blocking system like reclaim.

A lot of people prefer data view though, so it's really about choosing the approach that works best for you.

Qapla'!

Thanks for watching.