Add new note with single tap on iOS

I’ll start off by saying I’m really not the best person to ask for any of this - But hopefully if people stumble across this, there will be others who can help!

I want to use Agenda as a scratchpad for certain things, but found it a little laborious to open the app, decide on which catagory to jot down the note, pick a project and then write a new note. For something like a phone number or email address, this was overkill.

So, before you start, make a new project called “Inbox”, or whatever you want it to be, and within that project make a new note called “inbox”, or, again, whatever suits you.

Mine looks like this:

My idea being that these little tidbits of info don’t need their own dedicated notes with titles and structure - I literally need the equivalent of a post it note that could possibly be thrown away once I’ve used it.

If I need to keep it, I’ll transfer it to a new note later on (where it can be organised properly).

Now that’s done, you’ll need to open Apple Shortcuts and “create new shortcut”

Now, this is where I can’t work out what options automatically come up, but when you search for “Agenda”, you should be presented with some options to add to the shortcut.

The one you want is “show note in Project Inbox” - This will take you straight to your “master note” where you can add new bits of info.

If you’d rather create a new note each time, you can select “create note in Project Inbox”, and that will do what it says on the tin.

After that, it’s simply a case of naming your shortcut, adding it to your widgets if it isn’t already, and then you can simply swipe across to your widgets (swipe from left to right on the first iOS screen to access this), tap on your shortcut and away you go!

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Thanks for sharing, great tips!

How come when I search for Agenda after I start creating a new shortcut in shortcuts I get nothing? I have Agenda (I am running the beta) and nothing comes up. Is there anything that needs to be done before you do this?

This is the confusing part, and something I’m not knowledgeable to answer (hoping there is an iOS shortcuts wizard here somewhere).

When I set up the shortcuts, there seems to be different options each time - No obvious pattern, and even my iPad and iPhone presented me with different options.

It felt like it was picking them at random (and luckily, one of them was to open the note I needed). But a few times I tried to set it up, it didn’t give me that option.

So unfortunately I’m not going to be of much use here - Hopefully someone else can help?

Yeah, I was poking around and found two Agenda-related actions, but they are not editable. One is useful because it opens what’s on the agenda, and if you keep your scratchpad note there, you get to it. But it’s clearly not a very adaptable system

I should also add that one of the two Agenda-related actions I eventually found in Shortcuts was to open notes in one of my Agenda projects. Which means it is the app (Shortcut) itself that automatically generates some of these by learning how you use the other app (Agenda in this case). It’s the only explanation I can come up with for this behavior

The way this works is that actions are “donated” by the app to the Shortcuts system. Typically what you need to do is use the action to give apps an opportunity to “donate” it to the system. After that they should appear in that list.

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Thanks Nick. I just noticed the Agenda 3D Touch shortcut menu has a “New Note” Option. I used your method and this and they pretty similar in speed.

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It would be nice if it created new note right away without promting where to put it. Kinda inbox or something, where all shared/quicly created notes are collected and then organized from.
This could be a new section in Overview category for example.

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