I’ve been a long time Things user too. What features would you expect to see? I keep asking myself whether I could simply replace Things with Agenda. If that is the case, I would be curious about how to import into Agenda or at least discuss strategies for importing from other apps.
I’ve tried to replace Things before (Tick-Tick, ToDoist) and found myself returning to Things because other options are just too fidgety. Over time, my Things data has become a place to dump anything I am sure to forget but want to recall by doing a search (things to do in a city, things to lookup later, quotes that might be useful), which sound more like notes than to-dos that go away when finished.
I myself am having a hard time kicking Things 3. It allows me to share a link from remote updating schedules and other data in Things 3. I also us Zaper with Things 3 to cross input data to other platforms.
However, I just wish an Agenda Project can be shared with other users in real-time.
Agenda cannot seek to be a replacement for Things or OmniFocus. Those two companies have been honing their products for years and agenda would shoot itself in the foot if it took them on. The best choice is to make solid, stable integration with Things, OmniFocus and Reminders. In that way I can take all the notes at my meeting, highlight a few action items and send them over to OmniFocus.
Yesterday was the first time I used Agenda in an actual meeting. I was able to take detailed notes, add responsible parties and tags. Whenever I had an action item I would put (action) after it. When the meeting was over I went home and opened my laptop and my iPad. I went through the notes on my iPad, creating projects and tasks in OmniFocus on my laptop. If I could highlight a note or some checklist or a paragraph and long press or choose a menu item and port them directly into my OmniFocus inbox, then I would be very happy. If Agenda tries to take on Things or OmniFocus then I am done with it.
Totally agree that Agenda should not try and become Things or Omnifocus - it is a note-taking app that has some checklists in it. I love that it allows me to seperate my scheduled action items (Things) from my thinking and planning (Agenda).
I can send things to Things, but weirdly I am not finding a “Share” contribution from Agenda in System Preferences. It seems odd to use everyone elses Sharing ability and not contribute one for the other direction. Maybe its on the list and I missed it.
By “integration” — do you mean using Things as the calendar for Agenda? That would be useful for me too.
I use both Things and Agenda — and OmniFocus for client work.
For me, Agenda is for note-taking, planning, outlining etc.
Things and OmniFocus store my appointments, tasks, and repeat tasks.
Before I used Agenda, I used Bear for planning and outlining, which was OK, but I had too many notes “pinned” and linked, and I’d lose track of notes.
That doesn’t happen with Agenda. Even with a dozen projects, I can scroll though a project and continue working each day without spending five minutes looking for a note that I was sure was there, but which I can no longer find.
After a couple of weeks of working with Agenda, I keep finding new ways it’s useful. GREAT app.
Here’s an example that would illustrate an integration point: I use Things as my “source of truth” for all of my tasks/projects and then I typically look at my Things 3 “Today” list and start scribbling notes down on a physical sheet of paper for the day. As I work through my list, I use the sheet of paper as a scratch pad on top of my tasks and at the end of day I go back to Things and update my tasks (and usually add a few new ones as a result of my work.) So the integration I’d seek would be:
From Things 3, grab my Today list of tasks and import them into an Agenda note for that day.
As a nice to have if I could send a list of Agenda tasks back to Things at the end of my day, that would be great too.
For me I’d like to have Agenda as my daily scratchpad of notes and working lists but I don’t really want to keep all of my tasks inside of it.
Very interesting discussion here where I want to share my 2 cents with you:
Agendas way of date-based note organization and the „on the agenda“-concept makes it ideal for me to record meeting notes, jot down the gist of a telefone call and other notetaking. Inline and people tagging make it even more valuable for me.
I’m also using Things for my personal task management for many years now and it’s just perfect. I never felt any urge to replace it with any other tool and imho Agenda should never try to catch up, but better excel at its own profession.
I’m using Agenda mainly to prepare and take meeting notes where I also record action items assigned to different members of my team using inline people tags. If there are any action items for myself or other important action items I want to monitor, I copy them into things and also backlink the things-URL to agenda.
Since Things 3 also has a quite good x-callback-url support, the perfect Integration for me would be if I could either insert a things task via drag-n-drop or convert an existing paragraph in Agenda into a new things task. Via the x-callback Interface Agenda should then resolve the url and render this paragraph as a Things task inferring the information about it directly from things (such as title, checked state, maybe deadline or even tags). By establishing a „known link“, the linked task will then get updated in Agenda whenever I make any changes to it in Things (vice versa - with the exception of checking - is not really needed imho, since I could always follow the link and edit task details in Things).
“things:///show?id=27DAD2AF-89BA-48D4-90FB-0CB4A6E38139” would become „[ ] Setup test system“ for example.
I think, that Agenda and Things could complement each other in a good way. Things is just perfect to getting my things done, while Agenda is the “swap file of my brain” and should really focus on the wider context of a task. When I recall on a meeting, it would be perfect if I would automatically see which of my action items I already have completed - without a any duplicate record keeping in two different tools.
I just love to combine focused best of breed tools that suit my own workflow rather than looking for the jack of all trades.
@drewmccormack I think this is a very interesting topic, because it debates what Agenda can be or should be.
I disagree with everyone who said Agenda shouldn’t try to be Things 3 but work along side it.
I believe it only makes sense to say that, if you’ve been using Things/Omnifocus for years and have a hard time picturing yourself dropping them. And even then, I wonder why you wouldn’t wish for Agenda to have a more advance task managing system, allowing you to only use one app.
But when it comes to most people, we’re not looking for download 3 different apps to do similar tasks, especially when the point of Agenda, in the first place, is to take the best things from known great apps, to make it a more flexible tool.
So myself, and many others that I know who use the Agenda app, actually really really wish for Agenda to replace Things/Omnifocus as a decent task manager. We don’t want it to be a copy, or steal features or to be as advanced. Just to be good enough that we can no longer depend on other task managers such as Things.
No app out there should be made with the idea in mind that it needs to work with other apps made by other companies to be efficient. And check listing / task managing is obviously an important feature when it comes to taking notes, and planning projects.
So please Agenda team, don’t consider those few comments up there as the consensus.
We don’t want to use Things 3 alongside Agenda. Some people want and can, but it shouldn’t be almost a necessity to have decent task managing I don’t want to Use Omnifocus, and Notablity, and Goodnotes. And I believe that was the idea when you decided to create Agenda.
If it makes you feel better, I do use Agenda as my task manager now (ex-OF). So I know where you are coming from, and we do plan to improve list handling to make it possible to do more powerful task management that way.
I don’t necessarily see this as one or the other. We already provide integration with other apps (eg deep-linking, x-callback), so it is possible to use Agenda in combination with other apps. I think we will continue to improve that too.
I could not agree more with this!! I already love Agenda, but the ability to seamlessly integrate with another powerhouse like Things 3 — that would be amazing!!
Drew, I liked your comment al lot. Only a few things would allow to use Agenda already better as a task manager. Assigning time besides date, and showing all overdue tasks as standard search. Priorities would be nice, but could be handled via tags. Very much looking forward to your future ideas …
Adding a Me Too. I have been stepping up my Agenda and Things game lately and I would really love if I could automagically capture all of my Things To Dos completed each day into an Agenda note, and have Agenda notes which link directly to Things to-dos as they do to calendar events … ideally both ways, so that in Things I could see when a to-do has an associated Agenda note!
Things doesn’t integrate with Reminders, other than Things can import tasks from a single Reminders list, and then deletes the tasks from Reminders. Once the task is deleted, so to is its connection to Agenda.
