Task Management in Logseq: Part 4

If you have read the rest of the series so far , you may have noticed that I am intent on only seeing information that is necessary. I want to avoid as much noise as possible to keep from getting distracted or overwhelmed. That’s why I love the concept of easily marking tasks for later, showing a list of just what I need to do next, and keeping the other lists collapsed by default. Another strategy for this minimalist approach is scheduling tasks. By scheduling a task in Logseq, you can give it a date in the future that you can filter on. In my “Now” list, I hide any tasks that are scheduled for a day in the future, but show all tasks that are scheduled for today or earlier and I do the same for my “Later” lists as well.

Scheduling Tasks in Logseq

First things first, how do you schedule tasks in Logseq? At the end of the task, type /scheduled. You’ll notice that as you start to type it shows a dropdown of options. Hitting enter on “Scheduled” opens a date picker. You can pick a date, add a time, or even set a task to repeat (we’ll address that in the next post). If you add a scheduled task in your Logseq, you may notice that you see a “SCHEDULED AND DEADLINE” list at the bottom of today’s journal. Personally, that is unnecessary and I prefer to remove it. If you agree, you can remove it by editing the config like we have done previously. You’ll see a line commented out that looks like:

;; :feature/disable-scheduled-and-deadline-query? false

Uncomment it by removing the leading ;; and change it from false to true.

Adding Scheduled Tasks to our NOW Query

What we want is to have all “NOW” tasks showing in the list unless they are scheduled for the future. This can be achieved with a slight change to our query.

{
  :title  "NOW"
  :query  [
            :find (pull ?b [*])
            :in $ ?today
            :where
              [?b :block/marker ?m]
              [(contains? #{"NOW", "DOING"} ?m)]
              [(get-else $ ?b :block/scheduled ?today) ?scheduled]
              [(<= ?scheduled ?today)]
          ]
  :inputs [:today]
  :result-transform
    (fn [result] (result))
  :breadcrumb-show? false
}

Here is what changed:

First we need a way to get the current date. We do that by adding adding

:inputs [:today]

However, we need to actually receive that and assign it to a variable that we can use in our query. We acheive that with the :in clause in our query:

:in $ ?today

The first parameter to the :in clause is always $, which is a reference to the database. All queries have a :in $ inferred by default, but when you are providing your own :in clause you need to remember the $.

Next we want to specify that we only want tasks scheduled for today or earlier. You can do that with these two lines:

[?b :block/scheduled ?scheduled]
[(<= ?scheduled ?today)]

This assigns the scheduled date of the block to the variable ?scheduled and filters to only blocks that were scheduled for before today. However, this causes us to only see tasks that are scheduled because if the task isn’t scheduled, then it doesn’t meet the filter. We fix this using a get-else function instead to set the ?scheduled varailbe:

[(get-else $ ?b :block/scheduled ?today) ?scheduled]

This also assigns the ?scheduled variable, but this time using get-else we are able to provide a default value, ?today. So if the task is not scheduled it will appear to the query that it is scheduled for today. This brings all our unscheduled tasks back into the list.

Adding Scheduled Tasks to our LATER Queries

You can add the same four lines to the queries we created last time.

{
  :title  "WORK"
  :query  [
            :find (pull ?b [*])
            :in $ ?today
            :where
              [?b :block/marker ?m]
              [(contains? #{"LATER", "TODO"} ?m)]
              [(get-else $ ?b :block/scheduled ?today) ?scheduled]
              [(<= ?scheduled ?today)]
              (page-ref ?b "work")
          ]
  :inputs [:today]
  :result-transform (fn [result] ( result))
  :breadcrumb-show? false
  :collapsed?       true
}

Next Steps

Our final step is the next post where I show off repeating tasks to automatically manage tasks that I need to do regularly.