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The Tasks panel and task queries

Open Tasks in the activity bar (the check-circle icon). It gathers every indexed task into buckets, in this order:

Bucket Holds
Overdue a 📅 due date in the past
Past scheduled a scheduled date in the past, but no missed due date
Today due today
This week due before the end of the week
Later due after that
No date no date at all
Finished this week / Done completed
Cancelled [-]

Overdue and past-scheduled are separate on purpose: a missed due date is a broken promise, a missed scheduled date is only a plan that slipped. Which day the week starts on is Settings > General > Tasks > Week starts on (default Monday). The buckets roll over at midnight without a restart.

In-progress tasks stay in their date bucket rather than getting one of their own — being held doesn’t change when a thing is due — and the state is shown on the row.

Filters across the top: free-text filter, state, priority (⏫ High+ / Normal / 🔽 Low−), tag, linked note, and a Someday toggle. Agenda scope decides which roots are scanned — All vaults (default), Current vault, or Tasks home.

Working from the panel

  • The checkbox completes a task in place, writing to its file.
  • Clicking a row jumps to that line in its own note.
  • Two badges sit at the end of a row: −Nd is how many days past the date that put the task in its bucket (the due date in Overdue, the scheduled date in Past scheduled), and Nd with a Stale tooltip appears once a task has gone 30 days since its created date without being finished.
  • The triage menu on a row offers Due today, Due tomorrow, Pick a date…, Defer to #someday, Cancel/Reopen, and Delete line.
  • Reschedule overdue tasks to today moves everything overdue in one confirmed step.
  • Weekly review walks the backlog one task at a time — j/k to move, x done, t today, s someday, delete.
  • Archive completed tasks moves anything finished more than N days ago (default 30, configurable) into tasks/archive/YYYY-MM.md. Nothing is archived automatically, and archived tasks stay indexed and searchable. Archiving is only offered in the Tasks home scope, and it needs a tasks home set.

The Backlinks panel carries a Tasks in this note section underneath it, listing every task anywhere in your vault whose line links to the note you have open (- [ ] Review the draft [[Project Apollo]] shows up while Project Apollo is open). Rows behave exactly like the agenda’s — check them off, jump to them, or use the triage keys.

The Zettel hub has its own compact Tasks section showing only what needs attention now — overdue and due today, at most seven rows, with See all handing off to the full agenda.

Open Quick Capture with Cmd+Shift+N, then press Cmd+Alt+T to switch it into task mode. What you write lands in your capture file: inbox.md inside the tasks/ subfolder of your Tasks home, which defaults to your Zettel directory.

You can also assign a global capture shortcut (Settings > General > Tasks) that opens Quick Capture in task mode even while Baram is in the background. It has no default, because a global shortcut is intercepted system-wide and could take a key combination another app already uses.

A ```query block with source: tasks embeds any slice of your task list into a note, and the results stay checkable. See Query Blocks for the full field and operator reference.

All under Settings > General > Tasks:

Setting Default What it does
Enable Tasks on Index checkboxes across the vault and show the Tasks panel
Exclude folders none Comma-separated folders to skip when indexing
Week starts on Monday Decides what falls in the This week bucket
Record completion date on Append with today’s date when a task is checked
Record created date on Add to a task line you finish typing in the editor
Track time on tasks in progress off Write while a task is [/]
Tasks home Zettel directory Folder holding captured tasks and their archive
Capture file inbox.md File name inside {tasks home}/tasks/
Agenda scope All vaults Which roots the agenda scans
Archive after 30 days How old a completed task must be for Archive completed tasks
Global capture shortcut not set Opens Quick Capture in task mode from anywhere