Your first task

Press ⇧⌘N, or use the quick-add row at the top of the Table view: type a title, press Enter.

A task is a note

This is the bit that surprises people. A task in Pellet isn’t a row in a database — it’s a markdown file, exactly like a note, with some extra information at the top:

---
task_id: 8f2c1a
title: Send the quarterly report
status: doing
due: 2026-08-04
priority: high
tags: [work/finance]
---

Waiting on the numbers from Priya before this can go out.

task_id is the one field that isn’t optional. It’s what makes the file a task rather than a note — Pellet stamps it when the task is created, and a markdown file without it is treated as a plain note however many other task fields it carries. If you’re writing files by hand and they aren’t showing up in the task views, that’s the field to check.

Which means a task can have a body. Notes, links, a checklist, a pasted email — anything you’d put in a note. Most task apps give you a title and a cramped notes field; here it’s a whole document.

The fields

Field	What it’s for
Status	Open, In Progress, Complete or Skip
Priority	None, Low, Medium or High
Due	When it must be finished
Start date	When you plan to start — often more useful than the deadline
Group / project	A project or area, for grouping in views
Board	Which board this card belongs on, if any
Type	Any type from Settings → Tasks — a type can add properties of its own
Tags	The same tags your notes use
Recurring	See Repeating tasks

You don’t have to fill any of them in. A title alone is a valid task.

Everything a task can carry. None of it is required.

Statuses are fixed

Open, In Progress, Complete and Skip can’t be renamed or added to. That’s a deliberate limit: every view, filter and board in Pellet can then rely on what a status means, and you never have to reconcile two vaults that named things differently.

Due date versus start date

Worth getting straight early. Due is the deadline. Start date is when you intend to work on it. A report due Friday that you plan to write Wednesday has both, and they do different jobs — the calendar shows you Wednesday, the overdue list warns you about Friday.

Turning a task back into a note

If something stops being a task, convert it. Pellet strips the task fields and leaves everything else exactly as it was — the body, your other frontmatter keys, the lot.

It also moves the file to the vault root, so a note converted out of a task folder won’t be where the task was. If a note of that name is already at the root, the converted one gets a number on the end. Move it wherever you actually want it afterwards.