The Tasks panel and task queries
The Tasks panel
Section titled “The Tasks panel”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:
−Ndis how many days past the date that put the task in its bucket (the due date in Overdue, the scheduled date in Past scheduled), andNdwith 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/kto move,xdone,ttoday,ssomeday,⌫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.
Tasks in this note
Section titled “Tasks in this note”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.
Capturing tasks
Section titled “Capturing tasks”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.
Tasks in a query block
Section titled “Tasks in a query block”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.
Task settings
Section titled “Task settings”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 |

