You should not have to sync your notes to your task manager.

If you keep notes in Obsidian and tasks in Things, you have probably looked for a way to connect them. Searching for an Obsidian to Things sync turns up a community plugin, a command line tool, and a lot of forum threads. People want this badly enough to build it.

I get why. I wanted it too, before I stopped needing it.

What the sync stack looks like

You write in a note. A task comes up inside a sentence, so you type it as a checkbox. Now it exists in the note and nowhere else.

To get it into a task manager, you install a plugin. As of this writing the Obsidian Things 3 plugin creates a Things to-do from a note and puts a link back to the note in it. Its own documentation lists the limits: tasks that run over several lines do not come across, and the access token sits as plain text inside the plugin folder of your vault. Other setups use a script and an environment variable in your shell profile.

Todoist has a plugin that does the same job from the other direction, showing Todoist tasks inside your notes.

All of these work. Their authors put real time into them, and for a person who loves a custom setup they are a good evening. They also mean two apps, one plugin, one credential, and one more thing to break when either app updates.

The part the sync does not fix

Even a perfect sync produces two copies of one commitment.

The checkbox in the note says undone. The to-do in the task manager says undone. You finish it and tick one. The other keeps its opinion until you remember, or until the plugin runs, or never.

I have read my own meeting notes three weeks later and found a dozen unticked boxes I had already done. After that I stopped trusting the notes as a record, and a note you do not trust is a note you stop opening.

One line, two places to look

In Remlo you type a checkbox in front of a sentence, in any note. That line is a to-do. It is collected on the To-dos page with every other one.

There is no send step and no second app. Tick it in the note and it is done on the page. Tick it on the page and the line in the note is ticked. One to-do, two places to see it.

A slash command inside the note sets it to today, tomorrow, or a date you pick. A to-do has a due date for when it has to be finished, a scheduled date for when you mean to do it, and a someday flag for neither. Anything scheduled or due shows up in Today.

The To-dos page has a list view and a board view, and the board stages are yours to name. A task waiting on someone sits in its own column until it moves.

Every to-do links back to the note it came from. That is the same thing the plugin does with its link, except there is no plugin, because the to-do never left the note.

What you lose

The task manager itself. Things has areas, projects, a Quick Entry shortcut that works from any app, and a Mac and iPhone design people have loved for a decade. Todoist has recurring tasks written as a sentence, shared projects, and apps on every platform.

Remlo has none of that. Tasks recur only if you write them again. Nothing is shared. It runs on Mac, iPhone, and iPad, and there is no Windows, Android, or web app.

If you work in a team, or your tasks mostly arrive from somewhere other than your own writing, keep the task manager and keep the sync. It is the right tool for that job.

Who this is for

The person whose tasks start inside a sentence. Meeting notes with a few things to do buried in them. A project page full of lines you meant to act on.

If you open a task app forty times a day and rarely write more than a line, the sync problem never reached you.

Remlo keeps your notes in your own iCloud, so there is no account to make and no token to store anywhere. It costs $19 a year with seven days free, or $149 once, for Mac, iPhone, and iPad together.

I stopped syncing when the second copy stopped existing.