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📒 Plugin Overview

A plugin that brings task management to SiYuan Notes, developed to put the "Bulletproof Note-taking Method" into practice. It supports desktop and mobile system notifications for task reminders, calendar view scheduling, project management, an Eisenhower Matrix panel, Pomodoro focus sessions, habit tracking, and more.

📝 Changelog

See: CHANGELOG.md

✨ Star History

Star History Chart

How to Use the Plugin

Documentation: https://www.zhihu.com/column/c_1998349446233202806

AI knowledge-base Q&A: https://zhida.zhihu.com/repositories/7611936317241043831

Plugin Feature Guides

Task Management Reflections

Important Plugin Updates

Why I Developed This Plugin

After reading The Bullet Journal Method and Bulletproof Note-taking, I realized that note-taking software should not be limited to recording knowledge and organizing materials. It should become an action hub: a productivity tool that integrates plans, execution, reviews, and lessons learned.

My reading reflections

For most people, organizing notes and materials is not the most important thing. What matters more is clarifying what is important right now, clarifying life goals, and then taking action toward them. If notes do not interact with our daily actions, project progress, and goal achievement, then even the most beautiful knowledge base is just a graveyard of information.

In reality, many note-taking tools have become stronger and stronger at "recording," but still do not support "action" well enough. We can easily collect information, excerpt ideas, build bidirectional links, and organize knowledge structures. Now AI can even accelerate information gathering and organization. But when task management is missing, it becomes easy to fall into the trap of over-organizing: collecting too much information, taking endless notes, tagging everything, and building a personal library while forgetting the real value of notes, which is to support thinking, decision-making, and action. As a result, the notes keep growing, but the truly important work may not move forward. AI is already strong at organizing information, but it cannot replace our own thinking about life projects, actual action, or project execution. Those still have to be done by us.

SiYuan Notes does not natively provide local schedule reminders, and its database view also cannot display parent-child task hierarchies, calendar views, and other structures well enough for task management. That is why I developed this plugin.

I hope it can help connect the full loop of "idea -> plan -> execution -> review." More specifically, I hope it can:

  • Let me naturally connect a note to a project, a goal, or a to-do item while writing, instead of taking notes just for the sake of collecting more notes.
  • Help me schedule near-term tasks and move multiple projects forward in parallel. For long-term tasks in the future, it should remind me to work on them when I have time, rather than only remembering them when the deadline is close.
  • Let me return to the relevant notes during execution to check the context, ideas, and reasoning behind a task.
  • Let me review afterward: what I did, why I did it, what happened, and how I should adjust next.

Why I Don't Use TickTick or Similar To-Do Apps for Task Management

The Bulletproof Note-taking Method recommends not using to-do list apps as the core of task management. Instead, it recommends managing tasks directly inside note-taking software and building a task-note system that can truly support your work.

Why?

  1. These to-do apps do not have a support system behind them.

    In TickTick, it is easy to list recent things to do, but often that only moves the chaos in your mind into another list. The chaos is not really reduced. It works well for fixed schedules and short-term items, but it is hard to support long-term projects. For example, if a graduate student is preparing an SCI paper, they may need to simultaneously push forward supplementary experiments, figure organization, result writing, reference management, and submission materials, while constantly linking those tasks back to experiment records, advisor feedback, and related literature. A to-do app usually records only scattered individual tasks without an overall structure. In SiYuan Notes, I can keep all materials related to a project or paper together, and then add time-based reminders for any block or document. In that way, a task is no longer just an isolated line item. It becomes an action node embedded in a concrete project, which makes it possible to build a comfortable closed loop for task management.

  2. Functionally, TickTick is better suited to clearly scheduled items than long-term project management.

    For items such as "Wednesday morning group meeting" or "Submit the PPT before Friday," TickTick is very convenient, and its cross-platform notification support is excellent. But when facing a long project with many stages, it becomes less effective. It does not natively provide richer task states such as in progress, short-term, long-term, or temporarily shelved. When users push long-term projects forward, various tasks accumulate together, near-term tasks and possible future tasks get mixed, management pressure increases, procrastination becomes more likely, and projects are easier to abandon halfway.

  3. After a task is completed in a to-do app, it simply gets crossed out. There is no strong workflow for archiving and organizing completed tasks, so knowledge and action remain disconnected.

    You may say: isn't it satisfying to check something off? It is. But if a task truly ends the moment it is checked off, then it probably was not very important, or it could not generate further value.

    During execution, we often need to review background materials, prior experience, and temporary ideas. After the task is done, we also need to fold new insights back into our knowledge system. In a to-do app, these two parts are usually separated, and the result is: "the work is done, but the experience is lost." A note-taking tool can place tasks, materials, thinking, and review on the same page, which makes it easier to retrieve, iterate, and update. That is how value can keep expanding and how we can keep growing and improving.

    TickTick does have a notes feature and supports Markdown, but its note management and editing experience cannot compare with a dedicated note-taking app, and its notes cannot be exported. So I only use TickTick notes to synchronize fleeting ideas or temporary notes across devices, and I do not store important notes there.

Why the Plugin Is Named "Task Note Management"

Because Bulletproof Note-taking argues that notes should not be organized according to the logic of reference materials, such as time or categories, but rather according to the logic of task execution. Many people like to organize notes by time or category. It can look neat, but when a task needs to be executed, the required materials are often scattered across many notes, and every time you need them, you have to spend time searching and stitching them back together.

That is why the Bulletproof Note-taking Method recommends organizing materials according to the logic of execution from the very beginning, and recommends keeping task notes rather than collecting dusty reference notes.

Simply put, a "task note" or "project note" is a task-oriented workspace. It gathers all materials needed to complete a task, such as meeting notes, references, inspiration, plans, to-dos, and results of action. Once the task is completed, that note becomes a complete experience note that can be reviewed in the future and used as a reference for similar work.

Besides work, task notes can also be created for study and daily life. For example: "Learn statistical analysis to finish the analysis section of my paper," "How to manage money and make more income," "Learn AI development," "My child's growth record," or "Major milestones of my life." In other words, we can push our everyday goals forward as tasks and projects instead of merely writing them down on a wish list or giving up after a few days of motivation.

Does writing task notes mean abandoning knowledge management? Not really. What I advocate is: finish the task first, and after the task is complete, organize the experience accumulated during the process into corresponding topic notes. In other words, build your personal knowledge base from practice, after practice.

For example, if I am writing a paper and learning different analysis methods to complete it, my priority is clearly to finish the paper. During the process, I can take simple notes about those analysis methods. After the paper is finished, I can organize those methods into a topic note such as "Summary of XXXX Data Analysis Methods" and link them properly for future reuse. If I get obsessed with the history or theoretical detail of each method at the very beginning and write exhaustive notes about them, that will instead slow down the paper itself. Also, real knowledge is knowledge that has been used and practiced, not just written down. Only through real task execution do insights become deeper, and only then do notes become something more than AI-generated text or generic material found online. In many cases, there is no need to rush to record everything immediately.

Introduction to the Bulletproof Note-taking Method

If you want to understand the Bulletproof Note-taking Method, you can read The Bullet Journal Method and Bulletproof Note-taking.

Here is a brief introduction:

"Most people do not need to organize materials. They need to organize tasks."

Many books and blogs about knowledge management advocate building a "second brain," but this should not be understood as simply building a material repository. If the goal of a second brain is only to organize materials, it is easy to fall into the trap of categorizing for the sake of categorizing. In that case, we may spend a huge amount of time classifying and structuring information, but that work is disconnected from our real goals and actual task progress.

A true "second brain" is not just a storage system for data. It is a practical tool that guides action.

The Bulletproof Note-taking Method, simply put, shifts note-taking away from recording materials merely to avoid forgetting and toward keeping core task notes centered on tasks.
This method treats notes as tools for action rather than passive containers of knowledge. It encourages us to focus on real tasks and actions instead of over-focusing on organizing and categorizing materials.

Notes should not exist merely for copying and storing. They should exist for creating, for turning knowledge into action, and for helping us shape things into the form we truly want.

Core Principles for Creating Notes with the Bulletproof Note-taking Method

  1. One task, one note, task-centered: The core of a note is the task, not the materials. Every note should revolve around a concrete task. Each note should contain a clear purpose and clear action steps. A task note must deliver an outcome. It is not a wish list.
  2. Clarify the unit and deliverable of a task note: The unit of a task note should be the deliverable, not merely the actions to be done. "Finish a publishable first draft of a paper" is a deliverable; "read literature" or "learn a data analysis method" are only steps toward that deliverable. Your effort should go toward delivering results on time, rather than getting lost in doing many things while forgetting the real goal.
  3. Iterate continuously: Improve notes over time through practice and keep accumulating personal knowledge and experience. Do not expect to produce the perfect plan and complete everything in one day. Move forward gradually.
  4. Maintain an overall perspective: Notes should help you grasp tasks and projects as a whole, rather than in a fragmented and isolated way. When people deal with complex work, it is very easy to miss the forest for the trees, becoming overly focused on a single detail or subtask while forgetting its place in the whole project. Without an overall view, several problems tend to appear: weak links between tasks, duplicated effort, confused priorities, and ultimately drifting away from what matters most.
  5. Build a project homepage and make good use of links: Link all project materials, related notes, task plans, and actual progress to a single "project homepage" so it becomes a complete command center for the project.

Important Ideas for Time Management and Task Management with This Method

  1. What do time management and task management really need to organize?

    1. Choose what is important.
    2. Choose how I should act right now.

  2. Is the core goal of time management and task management to get everything done?

    1. The core goal of time management is not to finish everything, because in reality we cannot finish everything. The things we want and need to do will always exceed the time available to us.
    2. So we must make choices. These choices should not be arbitrary. They should rely on a system, one that helps us clarify the best next action through task relationships, task breakdown, and project integration.
    3. For personal matters, the deeper meaning of a reminder is not necessarily "this must be done today," but rather "this can be done today," so that we avoid aimlessness and drifting.

  3. What is the correct process for building a task management system?

    • We should not bury ourselves in a pile of messy work and just grind. That may solve some problems, but it often consumes huge amounts of time and energy, may even lead us in the wrong direction, and finally leaves us with nothing meaningful accomplished.

    • The following order is extremely important:

      • Step 1: Set the goals you truly want to achieve, and make sure the things you choose are genuinely important. Only by first taking control of what is valuable can we know how our time and energy should be allocated.
      • Step 2: Break those goals down into executable actions. Make tasks concrete and actionable.
      • Step 3: Start arranging actions and gradually realize those goals. After clarifying what to do, then plan when to do it.

  4. How do we build a time and task management system that does not let things slip?

    1. Time reminders.
    2. But reminders alone are not enough, because we may still miss them or circumstances may change. Another important technique is to place actions and tasks where we must pass by when we need them, which is usually somewhere inside the task note or project folder. If we must pass by that place, we will see the task and be prompted to act. That is another reason to place related tasks in project notes according to the order of execution.

  5. Several stages of task management

    • Create whatever task comes to mind (passive response)
    • Focus on important tasks (active filtering)
    • Manage projects, care about overall project progress, and learn delayed gratification (process management)
    • Build a task management system, build a support system for tasks, align with goals, and manage and execute tasks in the right context (ecosystem building)

Main Plugin Features

  • Task management

    • Time management: Supports time reminders for documents or blocks, intelligent date/time recognition from titles, recurring reminders, and multiple reminders for a single task through custom reminder times.
    • Notification system: Supports desktop and mobile system notifications.
    • Block binding: Deep integration with note-taking. Tasks can bind to documents and blocks. After binding, you can click the title to jump to the note content, and hover to preview it. This makes it easier to build task notes and treat notes as the workspace where you manage tasks and write supporting information.
    • Habit binding: A completed task can automatically check in a habit, and Pomodoro sessions on a task can also be counted toward the Pomodoro statistics of a habit.

  • Project kanban: Manage all tasks within a project, distinguish in-progress, short-term pending, and long-term pending tasks, create different groups for subprojects, and manage multiple subprojects in parallel.

  • Calendar view: Convenient for reviewing schedules, and supports displaying tasks, habits, Pomodoro records, and other data.

  • Eisenhower Matrix panel: Distinguish important and urgent, important but not urgent, unimportant and not urgent, and urgent but not important tasks. Supports filters such as only showing in-progress tasks or tasks from a certain project.

  • Pomodoro timer: On desktop, a global floating Pomodoro window can run outside SiYuan Notes. Supports Pomodoro focus for tasks and arbitrary blocks, Pomodoro statistics, and calendar display of Pomodoro data.

  • Habit tracking: List the habits you want to cultivate, support recurring reminders, support goal types based on either check-in count or Pomodoro duration, and provide data statistics.

❤️ Acknowledgments

  • fullcalendar: calendar view development
  • lunar-typescript: lunar calendar calculation
  • echarts: Pomodoro data visualization
  • chrono-node: natural language time parsing
  • China holiday / makeup-work / adjusted-workday calendar: https://github.com/lanceliao/china-holiday-calender
  • Special thanks to Forrest for designing the plugin icon

❤️ Contributors

Made with contrib.rocks.

License

AGPL-3.0 license