Obsidian vs Calendar Reminders and Obsidian

❓The Problem

Since humankind evolved, one question has persisted: to obsidian or to obsidian with other tools in parallel. This note tries to balance out the equation by throwing in some personal observations and pointers, which are supposed to help me tilt the balance for a while, at least.

Just Obsidian

By “Just Obsidian,” I mean using Obsidian for as much as possible.

• Tasks
• Projects
• Time logging
• Notes
• Personal website

Pros

• No friction
  • Time logging is done in bullet points
    • A summary is generated by dataview like time-tracking-views
  • Tasks are done with the tasks plugin
    • Tasks are queried with code blocks
    • Tasks are arranged by tagging, sorting, and changing priorities with the task modal (Cmd P > Edit Task)
    • Tasks are viewed at a glance in markdown pages with embedded codeblock queries OR a canvas page with a grid of those markdown pages
    • Tasks, once configured, show up in the daily note, including overdue ones
  • The ability to write down whatever I want at a given point in time—a time entry, task, link to a project note, or link to anything else—is simply too relieving.

Cons

• Scheduling tasks is possible with the day planner plugin, but
  • I don’t have a lot of faith in plugins to base something so fundamental like scheduling
  • I would be able to subscribe to third-party calendars via a public ICS link, but there’s no telling when that would break because of lagging development
    • If that happens, it will lead me to a place where I have to check two places for what’s scheduled in my day
• Mobile UX is horrible.
  • Since Obsidian is a capacitors.js web app, there’s little to no integration with mobile native apps.
  • So
    • No reminders
      • I need the occasional nod to remind me to complete my tasks or that tasks are pending
    • Toggling tasks checkbox is prone to all kinds of mis-touches and mishaps.
    • I love that I can set multiple statuses on tasks, like in-progress, abandoned, or cancelled, but setting that requires a lot of touch-hold taps to happen in the correct order and at the correct pixel on the screen. Otherwise, you’d be marking the task as done instead.
• Calendars and Reminders still have to be used in some capacity
  • Calendar for scheduling events, plans, etc
  • Reminders for things that do need reminding

Calendar - Reminders - Obsidian

Here, by separating intents, the idea is to use:

• Calendar for time-logging AND scheduling.
• Reminders for tasks and projects.
• Obsidian for note-taking tasks, projects, events and publishing my website.

Pros

• Calendars are universal, dumb pieces of technology.
  • The interoperability is endless with iOS / MacOS shortcuts.
  • Various third party clients like Fantastical, Busycal, Calendar 366, even Noteplan, etc.
  • Very easy to include other people
• Reminders appear in Calendar.
  • Making it easy to “Duplicate as Event” to schedule tasks.
  • Both time and location can be used as triggers for task reminders.
  • Great iOS / MacOS shortcut integration, so it makes for fantastic integration.
• Obsidian is a dumb piece of software, too, just for note-taking / personal websites.
  • Obsidian is incredible purely for writing. The purpose becomes simply to write, interlink, think, organise, and publish.
  • Relying on plugins is no longer such a burden because bare note-taking and linking are core to Obsidian, and any plugins are supplementary in nature.

Cons

• There’s a lot of friction.
  • Switching between apps is as expensive as changing contexts.
    • Even with iOS shortcuts, it takes a long time to link between calendar events, reminders and notes, which gets in the way of vocalising my thoughts. This is also why I considered Apple Notes for a while today, but it solves one problem while introducing 10 others, like links breaking if you move notes around, no version control, random overheating reported on iPadOS on Reddit with many notes, etc. As much as Forever Notes
• Reminders lacks a “scheduled” date and has a very strict subset of capabilities that obsidian tasks do.
• Fantastical and Reminders lack a “share URL to event” action that would let me easily link tasks and events to notes. Instead, I have to rely on lots of Javascript using Scriptable on iOS to get the job done, which, again, takes time.
• Fantastical would need another tool like Calflow to provide statistics on time spent.

🤔 So what’s best?

I don’t know. Both workflows have proven to be good.

I have been using Fantastical—Reminders—Obsidian workflow from October 22, 2024, to March 12, 2025, and just Obsidian from March 12, 2025, to April 2, 2025.

The busier I get, the more deadlines I have, the more tasks I forget to see and check off, the more I want to be able to:

• Have a bird’s eye view - from my mobile home screen, from my watch.
• Log time entries and check off tasks from a distance - from the watch, with Siri? LOL
• Not have to deal with the complexity of management - stuff falling out of place, wrong actions getting triggered if I tap instead of tap and hold

However, whenever I open Obsidian (on both mobile and my desktop), I feel like:

• I own the world
• I have the grit for plaintext task management.
• dataview is easy… and free… and it just works because ChatGPT set it up for me
• Getting to use obsidian more makes me write more.

The answer is more nuanced and somewhere in the middle of both approaches. Whatever that is, it feels like a mirage.