What you owe, and what you are waiting on

A client meeting can produce two kinds of commitment, and a task list is built to hold only one of them.

There are the things you agreed to do. Those go into your task list, because that is what a task list is for. And there are the things they agreed to do — send the data, name the approver, confirm the assumption, get the third party on the call. Those can end up as a sentence in the middle of a meeting note, where nothing is watching them.

Why mixing them breaks the list

Put both kinds in one list and the list stops describing reality in two specific ways.

It overstates your workload. Items you cannot act on sit alongside items you can, so the list is longer than the work you actually have. Anything that reads as an obligation you are failing to discharge, when it is really an obligation somebody else has not discharged, costs you attention every time you look at it.

It hides where the engagement is blocked. This is the expensive one. When a date starts slipping, the useful question is not "what is outstanding" but "what is outstanding on their side." If both kinds live in one undifferentiated list, that question has no answer you can produce quickly — and it is exactly the question you need answered before a steering meeting, not after it.

An item owned by the client is not work. It is a dependency. Those are different objects and they want different handling.

Record the owner at the moment of capture

The fix is not a second list. It is one extra token on each line, written when you capture it — not sorted out later, because later is when you no longer remember who said what.

- [ ] What [owner:: me|client] [due:: YYYY-MM-DD]

Two fields. owner is who it belongs to; due is when it is expected. Both are inline fields, so they stay attached to the sentence rather than living in a separate structure you have to maintain.

The date matters as much as the owner. "The client will send the data" is not a commitment; it is a sentiment. "The client will send the data by the 14th" is a commitment, and its absence on the 15th is a fact rather than a feeling.

Close every meeting note the same way

One discipline makes the rest work: do not close a meeting note until the commitments section is populated — or until you have written "Nothing agreed."

That second option is not a formality. A meeting that produced no commitments is a real outcome and worth recording as one. A blank section, by contrast, is ambiguous forever: nobody reading it later can tell whether nothing was agreed or whether the note-taker simply stopped writing. Making the empty case explicit removes that ambiguity at the cost of two words.

Put their commitments in the follow-up

Send a follow-up the same day, summarising the decisions and the commitments — including theirs.

A written record of what someone agreed to, sent while everyone still remembers the conversation the same way and left unchallenged, converts a recollection into a document nobody objected to at the time. It costs one email.

Reading it back

Once every commitment carries an owner and a date, the engagement record can list what is still open across every meeting attached to it. In Obsidian, with the Dataview plugin:

TASK
FROM [[]]
WHERE !completed
SORT due ASC

FROM [[]] scopes it to notes linked to this engagement, so the query lives on the engagement page and collects commitments from every meeting note that references it. Sorting by due puts the nearest first.

Filter that view by owner and you have the thing you could not produce before: a current, dated list of what the client owes the engagement. That is the list you take into a steering meeting.

What you need to run this

• Obsidian — free to download, no account required. It is published by its

own publisher under that publisher's own terms.

• Dataview — a community plugin, MIT

licensed, which reads the inline fields and runs the query. You install it yourself from Obsidian's community plugin browser, from its own author, under its own licence. No plugin code is bundled by us.

Without Dataview the query renders as an inert code block, and the commitments are still plain readable markdown with the owner and the date written next to them.

The files

The meeting note and engagement templates shown here are published as a free, MIT-licensed repository:

https://github.com/engagementdesk/obsidian-consulting-components

Copy templates/ and dashboards/ into your vault and enable Dataview. The components are complete and usable on their own.

The commitment format shown above lives in templates/meeting-note.md.

More guides on running client engagements in Obsidian: all guides.

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Engagement Desk is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by Obsidian or by the author of Dataview. Those are separate products from separate publishers, distributed under their own terms.