Task Management in Logseq: Part 1

I use Logseq as a personal knowledge base. I use it to note all manner of things. Anything that I could want to recall in the future. Almost all notes go into a daily journal and I use page links heavily for any subjects. All of that is typical for Logseq, but what is less common is using Logseq for task management; tracking things that need to get done and having a focused list of what are your priorities are for the day. Here’s how I accomplish that.

As I mentioned, almost everything I add to Logseq is via today’s journal. When I do 1-on-1s with my direct reports or come out of an important meeting, I try to dump everything that I remember from that interaction into Logseq. Then I try to think of any actions that I need to take as a result. Perhaps there were things that were asked of me in the meeting. I add it as a task in Logseq.

Task in Logseq

Logseq has an interesting way of managing tasks. There is a great introduction to how tasks work and the variations availabe in the documentation. I’ll just outline how I use it here. In the settings, I have the following: :preferred-workflow :now. That means that when I hit CMD+Enter it will turn the current block I’m on to a LATER task. Hit it again and it changes to NOW. Again, DONE. One more time, back to not a task. There are some other markers you can use like CANCELLED, WAIT, and IN-PROGRESS, but I don’t make use of those.

So any time I have a new task that comes up, I open up Logseq (using a Raycast configured hotkey, of course) and drop a task into today’s journal. But stopping here leaves us with a problem. How do I see all my tasks? You can go to the dedicated pages like LATER and NOW to see those tasks in the “Linked References” section. Great right? No, not really.

What we want is to have these tasks on today’s journal page and make sure that tasks will never get lost in the depths of our knowledge graph. We do this with queries. In the following posts I will outline how I have set up Logseq to be the perfect task management app for me using queries to show all the tasks in my graph on today’s journal page.