Stepping back in here for what has evolved into a wonderful discussion, and the reason I do keep coming back to try and fit Agenda into my workflow. I love the fact that we can have meaningful dialog on these subjects.
To @mekentosj’s comments about the two huge goals they have, I applaud that and love the ideas of both. I can also say that the first one would go a long way by itself in solving the friction that exists today. If I could have a search that just returned notes that have an open task in them anywhere, I don’t mind searching for the task. The friction today is remembering to add and remove tags to notes in that state. So, while I want not only to have my cake, but to eat it too, that first step would go a long way towards satisfying at least my immediate need. I can’t speak to the other contributors ever and I want to go back and study the workarounds, but if it’s possible to get there in stages, I’m all for it.
As somewhat of a workaround, I have created a List (named:Agenda) in Reminders, which contains my undated reminders. They’re all in one place for review and give me the opportunity to make changes easily later on, if I with.
I’d know it was created because it would be in my inbox in Reminders.
I think part of the problem is that there are two fundamentally different ways of thinking about “reminders”:
Part of an automated process to alert me to an upcoming due date (in which case the date is crucial)
A flag that this task is important, which I will later decide when to work on it (date is irrelevant until later, when I plan my work). Basically I’m not capturing ‘reminders’ but ‘chunks of work’ that need to be added to my calendar (and I’m using Reminders app because it’s a convenient way to do it).
When I create a reminder in Agenda I’m generally in the flow with the meeting or project I’m engaged with, all I want to do is capture “here’s a thing I’ll need to deal with” - generally it’s a distraction to have to decide what date to set. (As a workaround I just accept the default date and fix it later when reviewing my Reminders inbox.)
The exception is when there is a specific deadline, eg in a meeting I promise to send a report by next Friday. But even here, using \remind(next Friday) is not helpful, because I don’t want to be reminded on Friday - I need to work on it before then! So what I need to do in Agenda, as I’m making notes of the meeting is write
Send report due(next Friday) \remind
accepting the defaul date to close the pop up.
I realise this is a niche use of Agenda, and don’t necessarily expect to be able to do all I want without workarounds. I just think it’s interesting thinking this through.
I suppose the bottom line for me is what lead me to abandon Things for Agenda: I absolutely hate tasks automatically popping up in Today etc. For me, being in control means that I make the decisions when I do which piece of work, based on ‘manually’ reviewing what else is going on in my work and life at the time.
I’d be happy with a OneNote (on Windows) approach where it basically allow you to generate a report of all your tasks, grouped with headings by the title of the note.
I care less about context, more about triggering my memory of anything that might have fallen through the cracks
Yeah that makes sense. That would certainly be a big win, and is straightforward. I can imagine that trying to gather more context from within the notes could get pretty messy.
I imagine once this was implemented, there would be a huge demand for context!
I’d like an option to display results with x number of lines or text paragraphs above the check list paragraphs. So, imagining some meeting notes, instead of returning:
[ ] do abc
[ ] call Jane
I’d see:
John wants abc to reflect xyz that Jane is working on.
[ ] do abc
[ ] call Jane
I think the trick there will be to combine such an open-task filter with other filters. Eg. Use tags in your notes to indicate which should qualify for an open-task search you are setting up. Eg. “Open Tasks in notes containing tag ‘work’”.
For me categories and projects are what give context, ie work v home, or client 1 v client 2. I can though imagine using tags to define classes of tasks like #call and #5minute. (Though I’m holding off using tags much until we have a tag browser, too much risk of duplication right now.)
Which doesn’t address the type of context I had in mind earlier. A task “call Jane re xyz” in a list of tasks won’t necessarily make much sense without clicking to read the note to find out why I need to call her!
But backing up a bit, there’s a question of what this list of tasks is actually for! Which will obviously be different for different people. For me, I can potentially see it helping me with the big challenge I’ve always had with note and task systems, including paper and pen:
How to get an overview of what I’m working on and how specific tasks contribute to overall objectives, and vice versa.
This is relevant periodically, eg reviewing work plan and goals for next 90 days, and daily, eg planning my day: of all the things I need to do, where am I going to focus my time and energy today?
A list of tasks without some kind of structure and context can be helpful to find a half remembered task, “what did I need to call Jane about”, but is generally just terrifying!
PS Having listened to recent podcast, this is intended to be food for thought rather than a feature request!
Yeah. I suppose a thing I have in mind is that an overview would be able to include headings. So if I have a note like:
# heading
some text
- [ ] task 1
- [ ] task 2
## sub-heading
some more text
maybe an image
### another sub-heading
- some
- silly
- list
- [ ] task 3
- [ ] task 4
I would love an overview that shows open tasks under their headings, like this:
Problem with this approach is that a lot of people use headings in different ways, so while it will result in great context for you, for others it might result in completely unrelevant context. For instance, what if I just wrote something like
#heading
blablbalbal times many lines
- [ ] some task
At what point is this heading still relevant. I’m afraid this is where it becomes less useful. I think the only universal context is the category + project + note title that we will provide, going beyond that is probably too much of a hit-miss.
I don’t have the time to go through all of the above, but think that what I would like to ask about or suggest, fits here. I use tags that start with DO (#DO-) and then something specific behind the dash. But when I search on that I get the whole note. At first I also tried to search for open tasks using check lists, but that search option doesn’t exist. Searching on tags exists, but gives me the whole note/project. What I am looking for is a search for tags that gives that paragraph that the the tag is attached to. An automated search in the sidebar would then neatly show me all those things (as one paragraph per assigned tag) I have marked to do. Now I’m forced to make a specific note with such a tag, but that doesn’t fit in with my workflow. Thanks for considering this.
Yes, this falls into the whole area of “summarized notes”. It’s a bit tricky, because we have to show just part of notes, and have to consider what happens if you try to edit etc. It is something that is very high on our list of features, and we hope to start working on it later this year.
Absolutely. It is a high priority too. We want to tackle this, and other search aspects, in an upcoming project. Not in the immediate future, but yes, certainly high on the roadmap.
