Focus Workbench

Focus Workbench

A local-first dashboard and task workbench for Obsidian. It turns Markdown notes and frontmatter already in your vault into a focused home workspace: capture ideas, view task status, choose a focus task, and track time without sending your notes anywhere.

What it does

• Shows a home dashboard with the current focus, idea inbox, and recent knowledge notes.
• Provides a task workbench with filters for today, active, in-progress, overdue, and completed tasks.
• Creates, edits, completes, and deletes task notes while preserving the Markdown-first workflow.
• Runs a local focus timer stored in each task's frontmatter.
• Optionally reads a .base file to scope the task list; otherwise it reads every note with type: 任务.

Privacy

Focus Workbench is local-first. It does not make network requests, collect telemetry, or upload vault content. It reads only the task, inbox, permanent-note, and literature-note folders configured in its settings, plus the optional task .base file. All task and timer data stays in Markdown frontmatter inside your vault.

Install from the community directory

After the plugin is approved, open Settings → Community plugins, search for Focus Workbench, install it, and enable it. Run Open Focus Workbench from the Command Palette.

Data format

The plugin works with Markdown files that use frontmatter. Its current task conventions use Chinese field names:

---
type: 任务
所属项目: ""
任务状态: 待做 # 待做 | 进行中 | 暂停 | 完成
任务优先级: P2 # P0 | P1 | P2
计划日期: 2026-07-22
计时状态: 未开始 # 未开始 | 进行中
计时开始时间:
累计耗时秒: 0
完成: false
---

Ideas use type: 闪念笔记. The default task location is 目标与任务/任务管理/任务, and the default Base file is 目标与任务/任务总表.base. Both paths can be adapted to your vault from Settings → Focus Workbench.

Development

This repository intentionally keeps the plugin source as readable, plain JavaScript in main.js; it is the exact file loaded by Obsidian. No generated or minified source is required to review the plugin.

Requirements: Node.js 20 or newer.

npm run release:check

The command syntax-checks the source, validates the manifest, and creates release-ready files in dist/:

dist/
├── main.js
├── manifest.json
└── styles.css

For local development, copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into:

<vault>/.obsidian/plugins/focus-workbench/

Restart Obsidian or reload the plugin after making changes.

Release process

1. Update the version in manifest.json using x.y.z format.
2. Run npm run release:check.
3. Commit the version change and push a tag with the exact same version, for example 0.1.1 (no v prefix).
4. The included GitHub Action creates a GitHub Release and uploads main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css as assets.
5. For the first public version, submit the repository at Obsidian Community.

Each release workflow also generates GitHub artifact attestations for the three release assets. To verify a downloaded asset, run:

gh attestation verify <asset-path> -R PavelPeng7/obsidian-ultra-dashboard

License

MIT