The People Note: The Key to Rolling Up Tasks & Projects in Obsidian

If you work with a team, you already know that effective task management requires more than just getting your stuff done.

For years, this has been a pain point for me. I don’t really want to track everyone else’s tasks in my system, but I do need to check in with people occasionally and make sure that things are moving along, or else I end up being the one getting in trouble at the end.

So, in this post, I want to share a cool Obsidian workflow I’ve created that can help you make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

How to Handle Tasks That Involve Others

There are a couple of different buckets tasks that involve others can fall into for me:

1. Tasks that I’m waiting for someone to do something before I can take action
2. Tasks that lack clarity and require a conversation before I can move forward
3. Tasks that are assigned to someone else that I need to follow up on

The first one is the classic Waiting For context. These are tasks where I am literally stuck until someone else does something. In my Obsidian task management system, these tasks have a #waiting tag.

The second one doesn’t require a deliverable from someone, but I do need to talk to them and get some answers before I can move the task forward. I’m still stuck on these tasks, but the next step is simply to talk to the person involved. These tasks get a #discuss tag.

Both of these kinds of tasks can be visualized on my Task Dashboard Obsidian Canvas file:

The third kind of task (ones that are actually assigned to someone else) doesn’t often make its way into my system. But every once in a while, I’ll add a task like this if it’s a really important part of a big project, just so I can bug them about it when I see them in a meeting. For this, I’ll usually link the actual task in our shared task platform (i.e., Notion) and include an internal link to the person involved with double brackets.

That link to the Person Note is important, so let’s look at that next.

The Foundation: The Person Note

As I thought about how I might be able to leverage the connections to the Person Note in Obsidian, I realized that if I gave the person a tag, then it would open up a world of possibilities. So, I added a tag to the top of the Person Note that I could combine with other tags to create a bunch of different workflows tied to the Person Note (i.e. for John Smith I used the tag #john).

By adding this tag, I could now show on the Person Note:

1. All of the tasks where I was waiting for them to deliver something
2. All of the tasks where I needed to discuss something with them
3. All of the tasks that were assigned to them that I wanted to keep tabs on

I wrapped all of these inside of custom callouts using specific task queries.

Here’s what it looks like (from ​LifeHQ​):

But at this point, you’re probably wondering about the queries I used 😉 Here they are.

The To Discuss with John query:

```tasks
not done 
(tag includes #discuss) AND (tag includes #john) 
hide tags 
short mode 
```

The Waiting for John query:

```tasks
not done 
(tag includes #discuss) AND (tag includes #john) 
hide tags 
short mode 
```

The Assigned to John query:

```tasks
not done 
(tag includes #discuss) AND (tag includes #john) 
hide tags 
short mode 
```

There's also a section below the callouts that uses a ​Dataview​ query to show all of the meeting notes I had taken where John had been an attendee:

Here’s the Dataview query for the links to the meeting notes where John was listed as an attendee (tagged in the Attendees property):

```dataview
TABLE dateformat(file.ctime,"yyyy-MM-dd") AS "Date" 
SORT date DESC
WHERE contains(attendees, [[John Smith]]) 
```

Then, finally, at the bottom, I can add additional notes that I want to associate with John. This makes the Person Note kind of like a CRM, but the real value is that whenever I’m going into a meeting with John, I can just pull up his Person Note and see what’s in the To Discuss with John list.

Creating a Template

As you can see, there’s a lot of manual updating that needs to happen each time I create a new Person Note using these queries.

Fortunately, the ​QuickAdd​ plugin makes it easy to add these from scratch.

Whenever I want to create a new Person Note, I can use a QuickAdd command to add specific text to a template.

Here’s the workflow:

• I trigger the New Contact command from the Command Palette
• QuickAdd shows me prompts where I type in the person’s first name, last name, and the tag I want to use
• The file gets created in the People folder, and those tokens are used to instantly create all of the queries

This is not only more efficient, but it also makes sure that I don’t mistype something when editing the queries.

Person Note Workflows

There are lots of ways that you can use these queries:

• As mentioned above, you can open the Person Note before heading into a meeting to make sure you get your questions answered on your To Discuss list
• You can quickly see where you’re stuck by someone before meeting a regularly scheduled 1-on-1
• You can instantly find all the project notes associated with the team meetings where both you and the other person were attendees

Having all of this tied to the Person Note opens up so many new workflows that make it easy to keep tabs on things where others are involved.

I’m really happy with all the uses I’m finding for the Person Note in Obsidian. If you need to keep tabs on things that aren’t assigned to you, I highly recommend you give this a shot.

I’m working on a YouTube video right now, which will show this in action and show you exactly how to build it better than I can in an email. But if you want to give it a shot yourself, I've included all the codes here, and ​here's a link to the Contact template file​.

And if you prefer a done-for-you version of this, check out ​LifeHQ​ 😉 All of the commands are pre-built, so you can just start using the workflows without having to build them from scratch.