First Look: Reviews Plugin

Placing 'review' tasks in future Daily Notes

I came across a highly specialized plugin — Reviews — that I immediately put to use in my Obsidian, because it offers a way to make simple something that I do a lot and my current approach is somewhat complicated.

Here is the use case: I am looking at some note in my vault, and for one of several reasons, I want to review it again at some future date, like tomorrow, next Thursday, next month, or some distant specific date, like a year from now. In some instances, I want to see if claims, arguments, or predictions laid out in the note have come to a head. In some, I just don’t have time at the moment to review the note. In other instances, I may simply want to collect other materials to support some thesis in the note, but I don’t want to wait an indeterminate duration to return to the note and the thesis.

In the past, I would have relied on the reminder plugin to accomplish this. But I noticed that my reminder list was being cluttered up with these references, and making it hard to see more typical reminders, like those associated with upcoming events.

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Settings

Here’s the settings panel for Reviews:

I chose a heading ### reviews at the location in my Daily Notes where reviews reference will be placed.

The prefix for the review I chose is - [>] [[•read closely|reviews]]: , about which more in a few paragraphs. I put this into the settings because it’s something I want nearly all of the time, and there is no way to add arbitrary text to the Review, which would be good. The plugin could display the prefix and allow it to be edited in the popup, which I will recommend to the developer.

Heading prefix and block review line prefix I am not yet using, so I just set them for creating embeds (also called backlinks or transclusions).

I defaulted the review date to tomorrow, but it can be overridden.

Creating a Review in a Daily Note

Here’s the command to create a review:

And the pop up:

In this case, I wanted to review a note a year in the future.

When executed, the plugin a/ creates the Daily Note for the day if it doesn’t already exist, and b/ adds the review reminder to the ### reviews header (creating the header if it doesn’t already exist).

The review, in this instance, in source mode:

In the Portfolio approach to task and project management, I have adopted extended task representations. In this case, a waiting task (- [<]). The task is associated with the read closely project, aliased to display reviews. (For more information about Portfolio’s tasks and projects (see Portfolio: Tasks and Simple Projects and Portfolio: How Notetaking Becomes Knowledge).

The reference back to the file is indicated by the backlink to the original note, the note’s name in double square-brackets.

And in edit mode, in the target Daily Note, it displays like this:

The intended use is that I would naturally encounter that Daily Note on 2026-03-31, and before I would do much else I’d notice the pending review for the Claire Cain Miller article. Once accomplishing that, I’d check off the task.

I can also proactively search for Reviews, as with this embedded query:

Limitations

But what if I didn’t want to do that, despite it being there? This is a core limitation of the plugin: there is no way to postpone a Review, other than a/ creating a new one, and b/ deleting the existing one. But that to me seems to be a fair trade-off to manage this use case independently of others involving tasks and Reminders.

A similar limitation is that the user can’t stipulate that a set of Reviews be created for every Friday afternoon, for example. Reviews are limited to a single, specific date, so other complicated scheduling would require other methods or tools.

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The search query code is beyond the paywall, available to paid subscribers.