Carry over unfinished tasks from yesterday’s daily note.

If you want to carry over unfinished tasks from a daily note, the fix in most apps is a copy. The open checkboxes from yesterday get duplicated into today. In Remlo they are never copied, because they never leave the To-dos page.

What a daily note does to a task

A daily note is a good place to write a task, since it is already open. Monday’s page collects the call notes, the half sentence about the invoice, and the line that says send the deck.

Tuesday you open a new page. It is empty. The deck task is still on Monday’s page, unticked, where you will not look.

This is the failure of any system with one page per day. The page is a good capture layer and a bad place to keep a commitment.

How other apps patch it

Obsidian has no built-in rollover. The community has written several plugins for it: Rollover Daily Todos, Task Rollover, Rollover Plus, and others. Each one copies open tasks from the previous daily note into the new one, usually under a heading. Some move the task, some copy it, and the Task Rollover page warns that running two of these at once puts every task in the note twice.

That works, and I respect the people who tuned it. It is also a plugin to install, a setting to get right, and a copy of a commitment that now exists on two pages.

Todoist and Things avoid the problem by not having daily notes. A task lives in a list with a date, and an undone task is overdue. That is a clean model if your tasks start in the task app.

What Remlo does

Type a checkbox on any page. That line is a to-do, and it is collected on the To-dos page the moment you type it.

Nothing rolls over, because nothing moved. Monday’s deck task is still on Monday’s page, in the paragraph you wrote it in, and it is also on the To-dos page with every other open to-do. Tick it in either place and it is done in both.

If you want it back in front of you on a certain day, use the slash command in the note and choose today, tomorrow, or a date. Anything scheduled or due shows up in Today when the day comes.

Each to-do links back to the note it came from. Open the deck task on Thursday and you land on Monday’s call, with the numbers that made it a task.

The ten second check

Each morning I open Today. Whatever is scheduled for the day is there. Then I open To-dos and scan what is still open. The ones that have sat for a week get a date or the someday flag. The rest get done.

Once a week this becomes a ten minute review. The page I wrote on Monday has no part in it. The list does.

What you give up

Seeing yesterday’s open tasks pasted at the top of today’s page. If you like that, because it makes the morning page a plan, Remlo will not do it, and an Obsidian rollover plugin will.

Recurring tasks. Remlo schedules with a slash command and a date, not a repeat rule.

Windows, Android, and the web. Remlo is native on Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Who this suits

The person who writes tasks inside the day’s notes and keeps finding them three weeks later. The person who tried a rollover plugin and ended up with the same task on five pages.

Remlo creates a page for every day, and it works offline and syncs through your iCloud. It costs $19.99 a year with seven days free, or $149 once.

A task that never moves cannot be left behind.