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Your brain keeps your tasks on one page: todos.md at the root of your personal brain. Not scattered across project pages, not in a separate app. One list, in plain markdown, that you can read in the editor, that your agent can read and add to, and that Cortex fills from the meetings and mail it files.

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The page

Each task is one line, in the shape Obsidian’s Tasks plugin uses, so a page you bring from Obsidian works as it is and a page Cortex writes opens in Obsidian unchanged:
The sections are yours. A new page starts with two: ToDo, your list, and Captured, where Cortex puts what it finds for you to move. Add whatever headings suit you; Cortex never adds one to organise your list for you. There is no Completed section: a ticked task stays where it was until the archive takes it. Indent a line under another for a sub-task.

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Where tasks come from

  • Meetings. When Cortex files a transcript, an action item that is yours becomes a line under Captured, with the date if one was said and links to the meeting page and the project. An action that belongs to someone else does not go on your list at all: it goes on their page, as a tick-box line under To Discuss in their Topics section, linked to the project and the meeting. Their page is your list of what to raise with them, so their actions, and anything they owe you, sit there ready for the next catch-up.
  • Mail. An ask of you in a forwarded thread becomes a Captured line, linked to the person and the message. Something the other person promised goes on their page.
  • Your agent. “Add a task to chase Monika about the P&Ls on Friday.” It formats the line for you, and checks the list first so the same ask is not added twice.
  • You. Type one into the box on the Tasks page, use the + button at the bottom left of any page of the brain (Task, one line, a due date and a section; it works on a phone), or edit the page itself in the editor: it is ordinary markdown with boxes you can tick.
  • Agent sessions. A commitment you made in a session (“I’ll send that tomorrow”) is captured when the session is filed, under the same rules as everything else in it.
Cortex never decides what matters most. Everything it finds lands under Captured; you, or your agent in the morning, move lines into your list.

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You never have to open it

The page is for your agent as much as for you, and the easiest way to run it is to talk:
  • “What tasks have been captured since Friday?” Your agent reads Captured and tells you, in a few lines, what your meetings and mail turned up.
  • “Keep the first two and the Perlon one, drop the rest.” It moves what you keep into your list and ticks off what you dropped.
  • “Put the ones I kept into Todoist” (or your calendar, or a ticket), if that is where you run your day. Your agent puts them there and ticks them here, so the page records where they went.
That is the point of capturing tasks in the brain at all: your agent now knows what you owe and what you are owed, and can act on it as an assistant would, without ever making you use the Cortex screen. The Tasks page is there for a glance and a quick tick when that is quicker.

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The Tasks page

Every brain with a task page has Tasks in its sidebar, straight after Pages: the page as a list, grouped by your sections, with a strip along the top for what is overdue, due today, due this week, or has no date. Tick a box to complete a task, untick to reopen. Add one from the box at the top with a date and a section. Move a task between sections from the menu on its line. Open the page takes you to the same lines in the editor for anything else. Nothing you did not touch is rewritten. If someone else changed the page between your reading it and your click, the change is refused and the list reloads.

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Kept tidy on its own

Ticked tasks stay where they are for a week, so what you finished is still visible in its section. After that the hourly maintenance moves them to todos-archive.md beside the page, one section per month, newest first. A ticked line with no date is stamped first and moves the following week. A ticked task whose sub-tasks are still open stays put. Archive done on the Tasks page does the same move now. The task page and its archive are the two pages the size rule leaves alone: a task list is one list however long it gets, and the archive grows by design.

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For your agent and for scripts

Your agent has list_tasks (with filters for due and section), add_task, complete_task, move_task and archive_done_tasks, and its morning brief carries the counts and the lines due this week. The same live at /api/v1/brains/{brainId}/tasks on the API, so a script can read or add to the list with a service credential.

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Try it

  1. Ask your agent to add a task with a due date of tomorrow and a link to a project page.
  2. Open the Tasks page, tick it, then untick it. Open the page in the editor and find the line.
  3. Tick a task with 🔁 every week on it and watch the next occurrence appear above it.