Hi —
Wondering if there are any authors out there using Agenda for book projects. If so, would love to hear about how you’re organizing your research, your drafts, chapters, all that good stuff. I’m thinking of transferring my partially done project over to Agenda because I like this app.
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Be interested to hear your findings. Agenda is not designed so much for that scale of writing, but I can see if you broke it down with a category for the book, project for each chapter, and note for each section, it could work. May be better tools out there for it though…
If you haven’t seen it already you should check out Scrivener, which is designed to do all of those very things related to writing larger works: tracking research, drafts, chapters, etc.
Chiming in, and echoing Drew’s remark, indeed for the writing part Agenda might not be your best option, apps like Scrivener, Ulysses, or Manuscripts are probably better suited. However, for researching, collecting thoughts, links etc Agenda could work very nicely in conjunction.
For writing, I use Agenda in conjunction with Scrivener/ Scapple.
I use Agenda for:
- Writing schedules for projects with and without deadlines
- Word counts (weekly/ monthly)
- Publication schedules
- Planning/ income (calendar)
- Marketing plans/current promotions: cost/ ROI
- Important insights
Basically I create a new Project for each of my projects. When completed, I move the Projects to a DONE Project so that I can hide them and avoid sidebar clutter.
I keep anything that I MUST remember on the Agenda; this means that I review these notes twice a day.
Over the years, I’ve used many, many, MANY apps.
My all-time favorite was Lotus Agenda: Bob Newell » Lotus Agenda
Lotus Agenda might be long gone, but it’s certainly not forgotten… And I just realized that “Agenda” has the same name.
Coincidence? 
Have fun with Agenda – it’s the first app I open every day.
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Although I wouldn’t recommend actually writing your book in Agenda it’s an ideal place for all your notes and planning, & there are lots of different ways that you can organize it.
One way (the best I’ve found so far) is to use your book title as a Category, then you can add each of the things you mention, plus as many others as you like, as Projects.
If you have Characters as a Project, for example, you can then have a Note for each one, listing every characteristic that person has, their back-story and any questions you might have about them that you still have to work on.
Location is another useful project, where you can have a separate Note for each place any action’s going to happen in. It’s great for jotting down lots of details, and it works all the way up from a small-town location to complete world-building if you’re wanting to write fantasy or sci-fi.
Plot is also a useful Project, so that you can add all kinds of story Notes as ideas come to you and compile them into the best order later. Likewise you can have a Chapters Project, where you can further refine your ideas and divide them up into a more-or-less even distribution of the parts of your story.
One important Project that doesn’t usually come first to mind in writing is how you’re going to sell your work. You can use a Marketing Project to make notes of publishers & agents, if you want to go that way, or lots of information about how to publish on Amazon, get reviews, make useful contacts, get reviews, etc. You’ll also probably want a Project for organizing your writing, such as word counts, deadlines, and whatever else you measure progress by.
I do my actual writing in Pages, but whether I’m working on fiction or non-fiction Agenda is my go-to place to organize everything I’m working on.
Hope it helps! 
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I use Agenda for the first steps in Projectmanagement.
Basic outlines, Topics and text passages.
In future more time related tasks with calendars and Excel/ MS-Project.
KInd regards
Mike
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I am grateful you took the time to share your methods, @Zoe. I’m not writing a book, per se, but rather trying to restart a sand box dystopian tabletop role playing game I had abandoned last year. I hadn’t used such a tool as Agenda to keep track of the world and it’s characters, so eventually the effect the players’ had on the world had become too difficult to keep track of. Your book writing tips appear to fit my needs quite well. I’m going to give it a whirl. Thanks!
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Glad it helped! From Agenda’s point of view I don’t suppose there’s actually much difference - there are still characters to develop and world-building to do, etc., so it should work as well for one as for the other. I think it’s flexible enough to be ideally suited to any kind of creative work, and the perfect place to play with new ideas.
Hope the game does well!
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