Todos

Snippets

The default Dendron workspace comes with the to snippet that expands to - [ ]. You can use this to quickly create bulleted checkboxes.

Interactive Checkboxes

Markdown preview renders an empty checkbox for any line that starts with - [ ]. A checked checkbox is rendered for lines starting with - [x]. Clicking a checkbox changes its state in the Markdown file.

General Workflows

When working with todos sometimes you need more states than unfinished|finished. Below are three different workflows to delineate todo state.

Inside the Checkbox

• put state in checkbox
• note that custom checkbox states such as [w] are displayed as plain text in Markdown previews. Todo lists of this type look best in the editor.

- [ ] : not started
- [w] : work in progress
- [x] : done
- [?] : feedback
- [>] : postponed

Kanban Based

• put state in a header

# wip
- [ ] foo

# pending
- [ ] bar

# done
- [ ] baz

Tag Based

• put tags in todo items

- [ ] foo #wip
- [ ] bar #feedback
- [ ] baz

Reordering tasks

Kevin's Workflow

This is a video of how Kevin manages todos in Dendron. It goes over the following:

• using journal notes to keep a daily todo list
• using snippets to create check boxes
• using scratch notes to create nested todos in new notes
• using search editor commands to get an aggregration of all tasks in a given day

Example of a daily journal note

• fname: daily.journal.2021.03.5

---
id: f06dcdd8-9880-46c5-8e02-ca4d515f59b9
title: '2021-03-25'
desc: ''
updated: 1616682579084
created: 1616647136455
---

## Tasks
- [ ] respond to missed discussions
- [ ] file tasks from yesterday
- [ ] file discussions
- [ ] GitHub issues
- [ ] GitHub pull request
- [ ] update weekly release
- [ ] commit all notes for the day

### New
<!-- Any new tasks that come up during the day go here -->

### Current
<!-- Long running tasks I'm focused on -->

### Today
<!-- This is usually created the day before -->

<!-- A lot of bullets are scratch notes that have additional context inside the note -->
- [[bob issue|scratch.2021.03.24.073330.tristan-issue]]
- [[weekly bug bash|scratch.2021.03.24.072120.bugs]]
- [[weekly performance improvements|scratch.2021.03.24.074210.perf]]
- Performance improvements
- Better Onboarding UX
- Custom Markdown Preview

### Blocked
<!-- Things that I run into blockers with-->

### Pending 
<!-- Features that are completed and pending deployment -->

### Done for Today
<!-- Features that are not completed but will take multiple days to complete -->

### Done
<!-- Stuff that I can leave here -->

Resources

Below are some of the settings used in the above video

• non-default settings

"settings": {
    "dendron.defaultJournalDateFormat": "Y.MM.DD",
    "dendron.defaultScratchDateFormat": "Y.MM.DD-HHmmss",
}

• snippets used

  "todo": {
    "prefix": "to",
    "scope": "markdown",
    "body": "- [ ] ",
    "description": "todo box"
  }

• search editor command used

  {
    "key": "ctrl+s t",
    "command": "search.action.openNewEditor",
    "args": {
      "query": "## Tasks",
      "triggerSearch": false,
      "focusResults": false,
      "includes": "*.journal.*"
    }
  }

Other Resources

• Markdown Checkbox Extension: automatically check todos