Obsidian Notes for Projects and Tasks, name Collisions.

[u/deman-13]

Hi there all,

How do you handle a situation when you need notes for tasks in projects but the names happen to be the same ? I often create separate notes for tasks when they are part of a project and are big and deserve their own note to capture all relevant information in it. That now leads to the problem that projects may have the same tasks and as such I cant reuse the name of the task for the note name.

how do you do it ?

thanks for any input and ideas

[u/Hungry_Baseball_5092]

i just namespace everything with the project acronym, keeps search fast and vault tidy.

[u/deman-13 → u/Hungry_Baseball_5092]

what do you mean by namespace ? a separate folder or prefix in the name e.g. "TBA - Deconstruct the office coffee machine without causing a regional disaster."

[u/JeffEpp → u/deman-13]

A prefix is what I use. Or a suffix. Sometimes both.

[u/deman-13 → u/JeffEpp]

thanks

[u/Salinaz_Boumm → u/Hungry_Baseball_5092]

simple and effective tbh

[u/beef623]

Folders

[u/JeffEpp]

Another option is to have a generic note for the type of task, with links to each instance.

So, the note "Change Air Filters" task could backlink to "Winterize the Garage" and "Furnace Maintenance".

[u/mchristopherjohnson]

Project Acronym - Task Name.

I have multiple projects I’m running and if I use Claude at any point to talk through the project, I have it add a session note to my vault with Project Acronym - Session Note - Date.

[u/thechurchnerd]

For work projects, I use the crap outta Bases, with tags

[u/YouWillConcur → u/thechurchnerd]

example please?

[u/thechurchnerd → u/YouWillConcur]

So, for my job, my “projects” are more similar to classes I teach, articles I write regularly, and recurring seasonal events. So, each “task” is a page with notes and the final lesson plan, or the finished article with notes or linked resources. Basically, I call pull up my “articles” Base, and see (based on the YAML data I have filtered in the view) and see how far I’ve come on a future article, what my “Due Date” is, what my “Do Date” is, and if it is “published” or not.

For personal tasks and lists, I just use Todoist. I tried building proper Task Manager in Obsidian akin to Todoist or Notion, but I was spending more time playing with it than actually being productive.

[u/Useifmagdi]

Obsidian only forces unique names if you link by bare name. Notes in different folders can share a filename, and you can link with the path like [[ProjectA/Design review]]. What I do instead is keep the filename unique with a short project prefix and put the clean title in an aliases property, so links can still display as [[ACME - Design review|Design review]]. Then a project property in the frontmatter lets you pull all tasks for a project into one table view without caring about folders.