Agenda and Obsidian

Talk
#1

Hi Friends. After dabbling with Agenda in the past, and then moving just about everything into Obsidian in Fall of 2020, I’ve started to wonder about pairing them in my workflow. I keep a lot of notes on a lot of different individuals and meetings throughout the years. Doing this in Obsidian felt right because everything would always be in there, would be searchable, and would automatically link together. There’s no friction involved in deciding where to write something or what app to open.

But I also feel like having all of these meeting notes from work and freelancing might end up gumming up the works down the road … overwhelming my knowledge-building, thinking app, with the minutia of the day-to-day world.

I really like Obsidian and will not be leaving it behind, but wondering if Agenda might pair well with it, being able to keep track of notes about a huge number of people and projects without introducing friction and sloppy organization into my life.

Is anyone finding success doing this?

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#2

Hi, @rothermel

Yes. Well, sort of.

I too have a lot of contacts that I have worked / are working / want to work with (or for). Initially I wanted to store all contact-data in Agenda but that proved a to be lot of manual labour at the time - there were no Templates back then, so maybe it’'s easier now. I chose to store it all in Google. Subsequently I can integrate links (through Shortcuts) to this info in Agenda notes.

Which means that whenever I am writing a note about a project concerning Mr. Green, I use “@ Mr. Green”. Then, when I actually need to call him at a certain time I use a shortcut which puts his phone-number on the clipboard.

Everything else is stored in Agenda; from meeting reports, pipelines, ideas, organisational info and to-do’s to private stuff. This works very well for me.

Hope it brought you some ideas,

Rob

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#3

I periodically “garden” my Agenda daily notes. I delete irrelevant items (e.g. daily tasks that I don’t need to keep track of long-term. I move / copy important into project notes. Occasionally I consolidate notes from time ranges into a single note spanning a larger time, e.g. a month’s worth of notes get combined into a single month-long note.

I think of this as journal thinking and wiki thinking. Journal thinking is great for me just focusing on stuff one day at a time. I can deal with things as they come up because I’m not thinking about where they fit into the notes system - they go in today’s note (and sometimes under a heading called “defer”).

Then to relieve some of that pressure / daily chaos, and help me think at a higher level / longer term, I incorporate that stuff into my wiki-style notes.

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#4

I recently moved my project and journal notes over from Obsidian - or rather the practice of taking notes in the app - to Agenda. What stays in Obsidian are “timeless” notes, e. g. Zettelkasten-style notes.

  • Every note in Obsidian has a unique ID (as an alias) which I use to refer to when writing things in agenda that relate to a timeless note. Linking them via Obsidian-Url doesn’t work for me, because I might move them or rename them.
  • I didn’t bother moving over my old notes all at once. I only move notes if I really need them in agenda, which is almost never the case. If it’s a journal/project note, I move them to a folder that separates them from my timeless notes
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#5

How do you create unique ID for each Obsidian note?