In Notebooks, todo lists are books which display their contents as clickable tasks. This means that each task is a separate document, and it is therefore not necessarily obvious how to manage tasks in regular documents. Here is how you can do that.
Set up Notebooks to Extract Tasks
- In Notebooks > Settings > Tasks, define your preferred task marker. This is a single character or a combination of characters which you use at the beginning of a line in order to mark the line as a task. You could choose “!!” or “*” or any combination you want.
- Notebooks provides a dedicated action Extract Tasks to detect and extract tasks from plain text or formatted documents and add the tasks to a todo list. Each of these extracted tasks is then a separate document in a regular todo list.
- On your iPhone or iPad, you can tell Notebooks to extract these tasks automatically whenever you are done editing a document.
- As you then tick off the extracted tasks in their task list, 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.
