In Notebooks, todo lists are books which display their contents as clickable tasks. That implies that each task is its own document, and it is not immediately visible how to manage task list in regular documents. – However, Notebooks is perfectly able handle todo lists that are embedded in documents.
Set up Notebooks to Extract Tasks
- Notebooks offers an Extract Tasks action which automatically detects and extracts tasks from plain text or formatted documents and adds these tasks to a todo list. Each of these extracted tasks is then a separate document in a regular todo list.
- You can define your own task marker, which is a single character or a combination of characters that you use at the beginning of a line in order to mark this line as a task. You could choose “!!” or “*” or any combination you want.
- You can also tell Notebooks to extract these tasks automatically whenever you are done editing a document.
- When you then tick off one of these extracted tasks, Notebooks tries to find the document the task was taken from and changes your task marker to reflect the task’s new state.
What may sound a little complicated is actually pretty simple. You type the meeting minutes, for example, add your actions and tasks by preceding them with your task marker; when done editing, Notebooks automatically creates a todo list for you (if you assign a default due date to these tasks, you will find the tasks in your “Due Today” book). Check off the tasks as you complete them, and when you open the meeting minutes document, you immediately see which of the tasks have been completed and which are still pending.
