PrimeTask for Obsidian

PrimeTask for Obsidian is built on a deliberate idea: PrimeTask stays your task and project tool, and Obsidian stays where your thinking happens. The plugin connects the two without trying to turn either into the other.

The flow most people use day to day is the simplest one. You are writing in a note, you have an idea worth doing, you select the sentence, right-click, and Send selection to PrimeTask and link here. The selected text becomes a [[wikilink]] to a new task note, the task is born inside PrimeTask, and the task carries a permanent backlink to the note that produced it. You can always trace any task back to the thought it came from.

Everything runs locally on your machine. The plugin talks to the PrimeTask desktop app over 127.0.0.1, and nothing is sent through a PrimeTask cloud service.

How this is different

Most Obsidian task plugins try to make Obsidian into a task manager - managing your full task list, due dates, priorities, and project structure inside your vault.

PrimeTask for Obsidian works the other way around. PrimeTask remains your execution layer (Focus Mode, Gantt, Kanban board, CRM, time tracking, recurring tasks, reports). Obsidian stays your capture and context layer, where ideas are born and notes accumulate around them.

This is why:

• The marquee flow is note to task, not the other way. You highlight something in a note and send it to PrimeTask. The plugin does not have a "push every task into the vault" button, and there is no way to start a promote from inside PrimeTask itself - that would invert the design.
• Task notes are graph nodes, not checkbox lines. Every promoted task is its own .md file with rich frontmatter (status, priority, due date, progress) so Bases and Dataview can query your vault as a personal task database.
• The vault stays clean by default. Nothing is auto-mirrored. Promotion is always explicit and user-initiated.
• Every task remembers where it came from, with origin: [[Source Note]] in its frontmatter and a Captured from [[Source Note]] line in the body. This is something no other task manager can do - Todoist, Linear, ClickUp, even Notion don't give you a wikilink-everywhere backlinks pane on every task. Forever after, the task itself shows you "born inside [[Monday standup]]", "decided in [[Q4 strategy memo]]", "raised by John in [[call-2026-04-18]]". That's Obsidian's unique gift, and being wikilink-native means you inherit it.

What you can do

Before you start

You need:

The plugin reads and writes to one locked Space at a time for each vault.

Install the plugin

PrimeTask for Obsidian is currently installed manually from the PrimeTask GitHub releases.

<your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/primetask-sync/

Set it up

Step 1: Enable External Integrations in PrimeTask

If this setting is off, Obsidian cannot reach the app and authorization will not work.

Step 2: Open the plugin settings in Obsidian

You may briefly see:

• Connecting while the plugin is looking for the PrimeTask app.
• Connected when PrimeTask is reachable.
• Needs authorization when PrimeTask is reachable but this vault is not yet approved.
• Offline when the PrimeTask app cannot be reached.

If the status stays Offline, confirm PrimeTask is open and External Integrations are enabled.

Step 3: Authorize this vault

Once approved, this vault is authorized to talk to PrimeTask.

You can revoke the connection later from either side:

• Obsidian: PrimeTask plugin settings → Revoke on this device
• PrimeTask: Settings → External Integrations → Connected plugins

Step 4: Lock a Space

The plugin works against that locked Space, even if you later switch to a different Space inside the PrimeTask app.

Step 5: Enable the markdown mirror

The markdown mirror is optional and is off by default.

When you enable it, PrimeTask creates a small set of hub files inside your vault and manages any task or project notes you explicitly promote later.

After the first sync, you should see:

• PrimeTask/PrimeTask.md
• PrimeTask/PrimeTask for Obsidian.md
• PrimeTask/PrimeTask - <SpaceName>.md
• PrimeTask/PrimeTask - Inbox.md

The Tasks/ and Projects/ folders are created later, only when you promote something into them.

How it works

Capture from a note (the primary flow)

You are writing in a note. You see an idea worth doing.

With text selected, right-click on the selection and choose:

• Send selection to PrimeTask and link here - heavyweight capture. The selected text is replaced by a [[wikilink]] to a new task note, the task note is written into your vault with full frontmatter, and the task is created in PrimeTask. Use this when the idea deserves its own graph node - it shows up in the graph view, the backlinks pane, and any Bases query.
• Send selection to PrimeTask - lightweight capture. The task is created in PrimeTask's Inbox only. No file is created in your vault, and your note is left exactly as it was. Use this when you want the idea captured in PrimeTask but not surfaced in the vault - like jotting down a quick to-do during daily notes without breaking the flow of writing.

With no selection, right-click anywhere in the note and choose:

• Convert note to PrimeTask task - the whole note becomes a task. The note's H1 (or filename if there is no H1) becomes the task title, the body becomes the description, and the plugin injects PrimeTask frontmatter at the top. The file stays exactly where it is in your vault.
• Convert note to PrimeTask project - same as above, but the note becomes a project instead of a task.

In every case, the new task or project carries origin: [[Source Note]] so the graph view shows where it came from. Tasks promoted under a project also gain a Part of [[Project Name]] line in the body so you can navigate up to the parent project note in one click.

Or use the New Task modal. Click the + icon in the sidebar header to open a small form for creating a task without writing prose first. Fill in the title, description, project, status, priority, and due date. Tick Create a task note in your vault to capture the task and its markdown note in a single step - the note opens automatically once it lands. Archived projects are hidden from the project picker by default so the dropdown stays focused on what's active.

Live sidebar

The plugin adds a PrimeTask sidebar inside Obsidian.

From there you can:

• Browse tasks in the locked Space
• Expand subtasks
• Browse projects
• Change task status, priority, due date, and completion inline using coloured pickers
• Open items in the PrimeTask desktop app
• Promote items into notes
• Filter tasks (due date, project, has note, completed) and projects (has note, archived)
• Hide or show archived projects on the Projects tab using the eye-style toggle in the filter bar - archived rows are hidden by default. When shown, each archived project carries a small Archived pill next to its name so active and archived rows are distinguishable at a glance.
• Click a tag chip on a task row to launch Obsidian's global search prefilled with tag:#<name>. Promoted task notes carry their tag list as native Obsidian tags in YAML frontmatter, so the search lands on every note that uses the tag. Tag editing still happens in PrimeTask; the chips in the sidebar are read-only display + navigation surfaces.

"PrimeTask is locked" status

If you turn on the PIN / lock screen in PrimeTask Settings → Security, the plugin keeps a steady connection while the desktop app is locked instead of silently going offline. The sidebar shows "PrimeTask is locked" with a one-line "unlock the desktop app to resume sync" hint, and the Obsidian status bar reads PrimeTask · locked. As soon as you unlock PrimeTask the plugin reconnects automatically - no restart needed. While locked, no data leaves PrimeTask.

Promote on demand (the secondary path)

If you already have a task or project in PrimeTask and you decide you want a note for it after the fact, right-click the row in the Obsidian sidebar and choose Promote to task note (or, on a project, Promote project to note or Promote project + all tasks to notes).

PrimeTask does not dump all tasks and projects into your vault automatically. Tasks and projects stay in the sidebar until you explicitly promote them into markdown notes. This keeps the vault clean and avoids creating hundreds of files you do not want.

Two-way task Properties sync

For promoted task notes, these fields sync between Obsidian and PrimeTask:

• status
• priority
• due
• progress
• description
• done

These fields are especially useful when you want to filter or sort tasks in Obsidian Bases.

Project notes are different

Promoted project notes carry plugin-managed project Properties such as progress, health, counts, and dates.

Their body is still useful for your own notes, but the structured project metadata is controlled by the plugin and refreshed from PrimeTask.

Project notes at a glance

A promoted project note shows the project's structural data at the top (Properties panel + the auto-managed ## Promoted tasks block) and leaves the rest of the body as your own writing space.

Inside the ## Promoted tasks section, every promoted task under that project renders as:

- [[Task Name]] · [Status Name](obsidian://primetask-focus-task?...)

• The wikilink opens the task note (Obsidian default - a normal click).
• The status link reveals the PrimeTask sidebar with that task focused, scrolled into view, and briefly highlighted, so you can change the status from the sidebar's coloured picker without leaving the note. No fake-interactive checkbox; clicks always route to a real action surface.
• Completed tasks sort to the bottom of the list with a strikethrough on the wikilink (~~[[Done Thing]]~~), so the active working set is always at the top.
• A horizontal rule (---) sits below the section as a visual safe-zone boundary. Anything you write below that rule is yours and stays untouched on every sync. Anything inside the marker-bounded section is plugin-managed and gets rewritten on the next sync.

Self-healing project notes

If you accidentally delete the ## Promoted tasks section (or both of its hidden boundary markers), the plugin detects the missing markers on the next sync (within ~5 seconds) and regenerates a fresh section at the end of the file, complete with its --- divider. No need to re-promote anything in PrimeTask - your project note recovers automatically.

Query your tasks with Bases

Because every promoted task carries typed frontmatter (status, priority, due, progress, project, tags, origin), you can use Obsidian's built-in Bases to render live, filterable, sortable tables of your tasks anywhere in your vault. No plugin install required - Bases ships with Obsidian core.

A Bases file inside a project note can show every incomplete task in that project, sorted by due date, with status and priority columns. Or every overdue task across the vault. Or every task captured from a particular note. The frontmatter is the schema; you pick the view.

Because frontmatter edits sync back to PrimeTask, editing a status or priority directly inside a Bases table updates PrimeTask too. The vault becomes a personal task database that round-trips with your real execution engine.

If you have the Dataview community plugin installed, the same data is queryable that way as well.

Open in PrimeTask

Every promoted task and project note has an Open in PrimeTask body link plus a primetask-url frontmatter field. Click the link from inside Obsidian to jump straight to the same item in PrimeTask, ready for Focus Mode, Gantt, time tracking, or anything else PrimeTask offers that Obsidian does not.

What does not sync

• Task note body content does not sync back to PrimeTask.
• Project note Properties are read from PrimeTask and overwritten on sync.
• Task tags edited in Obsidian do not currently sync back to PrimeTask.
• Changing a task's project in Obsidian does not reassign it in PrimeTask.
• Deleting a mirrored note in Obsidian does not delete the task or project in PrimeTask.

That last point is intentional. Deleting a file in your vault simply removes that mirrored note from Obsidian; it does not delete the original record in PrimeTask.

Common questions

Troubleshooting

PrimeTask shows as Offline in Obsidian

Check these first:

The plugin says Paused in PrimeTask

The plugin was disabled from PrimeTask's Connected plugins list. Re-enable it there. You do not need to authorize again.

I authorized it, but nothing appears in the sidebar

Make sure you selected a Locked space. Without one, the plugin has nothing to show for that vault.

No markdown files were created

The markdown mirror is off by default. Turn on Enable markdown mirror in the plugin settings.

Where to go next