Obsidian Task Automations

Lightweight macOS automations for Obsidian daily notes. No plugins to install, no Electron apps running in the background — just two bash scripts and macOS LaunchAgents.

Zero manual task management. Tasks carry forward automatically, sort themselves by urgency, and recurring tasks regenerate on completion. You open Obsidian and start working.

What It Does

Automation	Schedule	What Happens
Daily Note Creation	6:00 AM	Creates today's YYYY-MM-DD.md, carries over pending tasks, regenerates completed recurring tasks, generates weekly summary on Sundays
Task Sorting	Every 30 min	Categorizes tasks into Overdue / Today / Upcoming sections, sorts by due date, pushes completed tasks to the bottom

Features

• Automatic task carry-forward — Pending tasks move to today's note every morning
• Categorical sorting — Tasks auto-organize into ### Overdue, ### Today, and ### Upcoming sections
• Recurring tasks — 🔁 every day/week/month/Monday regenerates with the next due date when completed
• Metadata tracking — 🆕 YYYY-MM-DD stamps when a task was first carried forward
• Weekly summaries — Auto-generated every Sunday with completed tasks and overdue count
• Structured notes — Clean # Date / ## Tasks / ## Notes format
• Idempotent — Scripts only write when content actually changes (no unnecessary iCloud syncs)
• --force recovery — Re-populate today's note if something went wrong

Task Format

Works with the Obsidian Tasks plugin emoji format:

- [ ] 📅 2026-02-20 — Buy groceries
- [ ] 📅 2026-02-22 — Submit report 🔁 every week
- [x] 📅 2026-02-19 — Fix login bug ✅ 2026-02-20

Daily Note Structure

# 2026-02-23

## Tasks

### Overdue

- [ ] 📅 2026-02-20 — Buy groceries 🆕 2026-02-21

### Today

- [ ] 📅 2026-02-23 — Review PR

### Upcoming

- [ ] 📅 2026-02-25 — Submit report 🔁 every week

- [x] 📅 2026-02-22 — Deploy hotfix ✅ 2026-02-23

## Notes

Free writing space — not touched by automation.

Requirements

• macOS (uses launchd for scheduling and BSD date -j for date parsing)
• Obsidian with daily notes in a dedicated folder
• Full Disk Access for /bin/bash (required for launchd to access iCloud Drive — see Troubleshooting)
• Tasks plugin (optional but recommended for emoji-format due dates)

Installation

git clone https://github.com/narenkatakam/obsidian-task-automations.git
cd obsidian-task-automations

1. Configure your vault path

Edit config.sh and set VAULT_DIR to your daily notes folder:

# macOS with iCloud sync:
VAULT_DIR="$HOME/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents/MyVault/Daily Notes"

# macOS local vault:
VAULT_DIR="$HOME/ObsidianVault/Daily Notes"

You can also set WEEKLY_DIR for where weekly summaries are stored (defaults to a Weekly Summaries folder alongside your vault).

2. Grant Full Disk Access to /bin/bash

This is required for the automations to access your vault when running in the background via launchd.

1. Open System Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access
2. Click +
3. Press Cmd+Shift+G and type /bin/bash
4. Enable the toggle

Without this, scripts will work from your terminal but fail silently when run by launchd. The scripts detect this and log clear error messages.

3. Run the installer

./install.sh

This will:

• Make scripts executable
• Create two LaunchAgents in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
• Load them immediately

4. Test it

# Create today's note (carries over pending tasks)
bash obsidian-daily-create.sh

# Sort tasks in today's note
bash obsidian-task-sort.sh

# Force re-create today's note (even if it exists)
bash obsidian-daily-create.sh --force

# Check logs
tail -20 ~/Library/Logs/obsidian-automation.log

How It Works

Daily Note Creation (obsidian-daily-create.sh)

Runs at 6:00 AM every day.

1. Checks if today's note already has content — skips if so (use --force to override)
2. Walks backwards up to 14 days to find the most recent previous note (handles weekends, vacations, gaps)
3. Extracts all pending tasks (- [ ] ...) and stamps them with 🆕 YYYY-MM-DD on first carry-forward
4. Scans for completed recurring tasks (- [x] ... 🔁 ...) and regenerates them with the next due date
5. Writes today's note with structured format: # Date / ## Tasks / ## Notes
6. On Sundays, generates a weekly summary in the Weekly Summaries/ folder

Recurring Tasks

Add 🔁 followed by a pattern to any task:

Pattern	Example	Next Due Date
🔁 every day	Daily standup	Tomorrow
🔁 every week	Weekly review	+7 days
🔁 every month	Monthly report	+1 month
🔁 every Monday	Sprint planning	Next Monday

Recurring tasks regenerate only when completed. If a recurring task stays incomplete, it carries forward as-is (no duplicates).

Task Sorting (obsidian-task-sort.sh)

Runs every 30 minutes.

1. Reads today's note and parses the ## Tasks section
2. Categorizes pending tasks by comparing due dates to today:
   • Overdue — due date < today (oldest first)
   • Today — due date = today
   • Upcoming — due date > today or no date (nearest first)
3. Sorts completed tasks by completion date (most recent first)
4. Inserts ### Overdue, ### Today, ### Upcoming section headers
5. Preserves non-task content (notes, horizontal rules, etc.)
6. Only writes if something changed — prevents unnecessary iCloud sync triggers

Weekly Summary

Generated automatically every Sunday. Stored in Weekly Summaries/ folder.

# Weekly Summary — 2026-W08

**Week:** 2026-02-16 (Mon) to 2026-02-22 (Sun)

## Completed Tasks

### 2026-02-16

- [x] 📅 2026-02-16 — Deploy v2.0 ✅ 2026-02-16

### 2026-02-18

- [x] 📅 2026-02-18 — Write docs ✅ 2026-02-18

## Overdue Count

**2 task(s)** still overdue at end of week

Uninstalling

./uninstall.sh

Removes the LaunchAgents. Scripts and config remain in the folder.

File Structure

obsidian-task-automations/
├── config.sh                  # Your vault path and settings
├── obsidian-daily-create.sh   # Daily note creation + carry-forward + recurring
├── obsidian-task-sort.sh      # Categorical task sorting
├── install.sh                 # One-command installer (creates LaunchAgents)
├── uninstall.sh               # Clean removal of LaunchAgents
├── docs/
│   ├── changelog.md           # Version history
│   └── lessons.md             # Debugging notes and macOS gotchas
├── LICENSE                    # MIT
└── README.md

Troubleshooting

Scripts work in terminal but fail under launchd

Cause: Your terminal app (Terminal.app, iTerm) has Full Disk Access. launchd runs /bin/bash directly, which doesn't inherit those permissions.

Fix: Grant /bin/bash Full Disk Access (see Installation step 2).

How to debug:

# Check stderr logs
cat ~/Library/Logs/obsidian-daily-stderr.log
cat ~/Library/Logs/obsidian-sort-stderr.log

# Check main log
cat ~/Library/Logs/obsidian-automation.log

# Check if agents are loaded and their last exit code
launchctl list | grep obsidian

Today's note was created empty

The 6 AM run couldn't read the previous note (FDA issue). After granting Full Disk Access:

bash obsidian-daily-create.sh --force

Why not osascript?

Early versions wrapped file operations in osascript -e "do shell script \"...\"". This is unnecessary — bash has direct access to iCloud Drive at ~/Library/Mobile Documents/. The osascript layer causes:

• Multi-layer escaping breaks with set -u
• launchd-invoked osascript has restricted sandbox permissions

Direct bash is simpler, faster, and works reliably from both terminal and launchd.

For more debugging details, see docs/lessons.md.

Recommended Obsidian Plugins

These automations work standalone, but pair well with:

• Tasks — emoji-style task management with due dates and completion tracking
• Calendar — sidebar calendar that creates/opens daily notes on click
• Dataview — query and aggregate tasks across your entire vault

License

MIT