How to Add Tasks to Your Daily Notes in Obsidian

This article is part of a series of tips on handling tasks in Obsidian. To see the full series, see How to Manage Tasks in Obsidian.

Do you use Daily Notes in Obsidian? If so, have you ever thought about adding tasks to your Daily Notes?

I’ve kept a daily journal for over a decade now, and I find it tremendously helpful to look back on the progress I’ve made in both life and work.

But a lot gets lost between the lines of my journals. I often write about the progress I’ve made on a project, but as time goes on, I forget the details.

One way to add more context to your journals without adding any more work is to keep a log of your daily to-dos inside the journal.

Creating Tasks in Daily Notes

There are a couple of ways of handling tasks in tandem with Daily Notes. One way is to add tasks directly to your daily note. Then at the end of the day, if you have any tasks left, you move them over to the next day. That looks like this:

This is a good solution if you only have a few tasks to do every day. But this is not my favorite solution, because I tend to have too many tasks to manage them like this.

Logging Tasks to your Daily Notes

I prefer to plan my projects in their own “project” notes, and pull tasks into my Daily Note after they are completed, creating a “daily log” of my completed tasks.

Here’s what it looks like to include only your completed tasks within a Daily Note:

You can create the tasks anywhere within your vault, and your Daily Note will find them as soon as you complete them. I like this, because it allows me to structure my projects however I like, and requires no extra work on my end. If a task is completed today, it will show up in my daily note.

And thanks to the Tasks plugin, this is super easy to do. Let me show you how.

Prerequisites

• Enable the Daily Notes plugin (included in Obsidian’s Core Plugins)

Using the Tasks Query Language

The tasks plugin includes a query language that allows you to pull in tasks based on whatever parameters you wish. You don’t have to be a programmer to do this, the query language is easy to understand, and doesn’t require any complex logic. In our case, we want to pull in all tasks completed on a certain day.

That query looks like this:

That’s all well and good, but we don’t want to have to manually type the date every day. That’s where the Templates plugin comes in.

The Obsidian Templates plugin allows you to automatically fill in dates. So we can use that to fill in the date for our task query. Here’s what my Daily Notes template looks like:

## Journal Entries
-

## Task Log
```tasks
done on {{date:YYYY-MM-DD}}

And just like that, every time you create a new Daily Note, it will automatically import all completed tasks for that day. This is the easiest way I’ve found to add tasks to your daily notes.

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