[hanlec]

Whatever system I have (tried to) used over time, I've run into the following challenges:

1. how to deal with old tasks (are they relevant anymore? should they be removed?). 2. connecting tasks to their related source and needed information to act

For the former, the accumulation of old stuff has consistently led to less and less usage of the system and as a result to a continuously decreasing trust in that system. Adopting a new solution has given the feeling of a better system with better chances to success; but it has mainly been about having a (temporarily) new clean inbox.

[lupickup]

Having a data model/system to implement regular reflection/cleanup/alignment on goals I find helps with cruft build up. August Bradley’s PPV has review cycles weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly which cover higher levels of abstraction as the time period gets larger. I’m building an implementation of it in obsidian, august does his in Notion (which I started with but started to see a cap on extensibility), it’s a WIP but I’d love other to make it less work for me :P https://github.com/tot0/ObsidianPPV

[raju]

@luxpir mentioned Obsidian in another comment [1] and it might be what you are looking for, in particular with a community plugin called Obsidian Dataview [2]. Dataview uses JavaScript as a query language and can query the Obsidian "vault" and create different views.

Another tool to look at is Logseq [3], which is essentially an outliner (supports both MarkDown and Org syntax), but supports a rather simplistic TODO management system. The benefit here is exactly what you describe—as you work in Logseq, you can create Todos, thereby connecting the task to the related source and any context that surrounds the todo. Furthermore, Logseq also allows for queries [4], allowing you to query your "knowledge graph", which you can embed in other pages.

Both Obsidian and Logseq store your files locally, so they can be easily version-controlled (In fact, Logseq routines commits your files for you).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30747131

[2] https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview

[3] https://logseq.com/

[4] https://logseq.github.io/#/page/Queries

[Edited for formatting]

[luxpir]

I'll just add that the tasks plugin in obsidian has its own scripting syntax, much simpler/plain English, and is lighter weight than the entire dataview alternative. I actually set my system up to replicate logseq and taskwarrior within the more mature and faster running obsidian project. Ran them in parallel for a while on the same files.

Main difference for me was that Obsidian can be an outliner or general markdown editor. Logseq very focused on the former, and atomising your notes, but in reality this is rarely useful. In my case at least, especially when writing long form content. Search is fast and complete in obsidian, so there's very little benefit to recalling and embedding single lines from entire vault, it's just a resource sink in my case.

[slk500]

in emacs org-mode you can archive some tasks, text - it will move it to another text file ex. archive.txt with the timestamp or archiving it. Beside this keep your file in git. so you delete text & make explicit commit message that something was removed.

[iib]

Some people that were interested in their productivity that I read seemed to have systems that regularly cleaned their todo lists for old tasks. Stephen King [1] advises aspiring writers not to note their writing prompts, as the best ideas should pop into your head regularly, or nullprogram.com [2] programming in /tmp/.

So maybe the way to go is to have a logrotate-like on your input file.

[1] On writing -- Stephen King, although I read it a very long time ago and would not be able to point to a specific page. [2] I searched the web but can't find the exact citation, and there is no search feature on the website.

[anon2020dot00]

Most things accumulate and need pruning. Some people would like to do manual pruning but I favour a time-based approach of keeping everything in monthly folders.

Monthly folders so basically with every new month, some things are not carried-over but are still there and can be referenced if necessary.

So basically, a new month helps with reducing the accumulation of old stuff which bogs down a system.

[fellowniusmonk]

Yeah, I've been thinking about how to tackle this and I am convinced any personal note taking app should have an archive all and start over button.

A clean sheet is intimidating when you don't know where to start but is a hard requirement downstream once your chosen abstraction starts to break under the weight.