An early adopter of Agenda since the 29th May 2018, more or less since when the app became available on iPhone and iPad, it’s only today –almost three years later– that I realised how very nicely the app fits as a manager of my weekly, monthly and quarterly GTD reviews for creative projects.
Here’s how:
Create category for creative projects
Create Agenda project(s), not to be confused with your creative project, where an Agenda project is a placeholder of cards and your creative project is the steps you take towards a vision of a goal
For each project add three cards: one for each type of review
Inside each card assign beginning and end dates for the different reviews
Inside each card assign a reminder for beginning and/or end dates of the review
Title each card with the type of review and the goal description
Add to each card whatever it is that you’re using as a home for your substantive work (ie, evidence of your work conducive towards the goal), whether that’s pen and paper, a digital location (either Agenda or some other app or a URL), a physical craft, photos, video, you name it
Add tags for filtering related notes
When review begins, select “Add to Agenda” for the card, an essential feature as different review types for different projects always overlap
Add commentary at will to each card, whether that’s procedural commentary or something substantive you don’t want to forget later on but that you can’t or don’t want to work on now
As far as I know, nothing other than Agenda is better for this very specific and critical purpose (GTD review) including apps such as OmniFocus, Things, NotePlan, TickTick, Notion, GoodTask, Reminders, 2Do and Todoist. The glove fits perfectly.
Thanks for the feedback, Antonio! Sounds like a great workflow. Hopefully changes later this year will make the app even more suitable to create more advanced workflows.
I’d say that one of the main ingredients in Agenda’s greatness is that it can be used in so many different ways, depending on the individual’s needs and preferences. I’m just an Agenda beginner, so I’ll probably change my usage as time goes by, and I’m actually not yet ready with my preparations. Nonetheless, here is my very personal recipe, or testimonial, in case it could inspire someone:
Contrary to @joseantoniolopezpaye , I don’t use Agenda as a kind of calendar to keep track of dates (for that purpose, I use OmniFocus) and then review the outcome. Instead, as a researcher, I use it to record various aspects of my project in the way described on AppStore and that made me interested in Agenda in the first place, namely to build a timeline—or rather a set of parallel but interconnected timelines—that documents the progress of the project, and to some extent plans its future. Unlike in, e.g., business (of which I’m experienced), where things can be scheduled with some degree of temporal precision, the times when inspiration hits in hard sciences can’t be assigned a date. Inspiration comes when it’s damn good and ready. Neither can it be planned what’ll be the result. Things are as they are, and my job is to discover how they are. At best, there can be conjectures. I keep track of these conjectures, and the work with them, as well as anything else. Here’s an overview of my vast Agenda structure for managing my project; creative parts as well as the tedious walk of life with documentation etc., and as you see, Agenda indeed as a result yields a pretty detailed documentation of the research—and its development over time, including both the good and the bad events:
I work with a structure of categories with subcategories.
To keep track of development, I never edit or delete notes, I just add new ones.
There are frequent “cross references” (i.e., links) between notes in the various categories/subcategories to show the interdependence and simplifying tracking ideas and connections between different parts of the project.
At “top level” I collect the ideas, the conjectures, the problems, etc., and of course the actual results, each of these (and some more) in its own Agenda project, where each note discusses a stage in the progress, or regress when that inevitably occurs. I therefore also have an Agenda project with discarded ideas (and so on), together with the reasons for discarding them. In that way, mistakes and erroneous thoughts and beliefs are saved for future reference, in order not to repeat them.
In one chunk there are collections of things to work with in different ways, such as conjectures to test, problems to solve, areas that need deepened understanding, and so on. There is also one “urgent” Agenda project.
Notes that at the moment seem to be more interesting, from the point of view of progress given the current state of art, are put On the Agenda, to keep track of what should have some sort of priority. Of course, OtA is not my boss, but my subordinate, to help me feel the current foci. But inspiration is after all inspiration, and when it hits me, I have everything else, too, immediately at my fingertips, by dint of the overall category structure.
Agenda yields a sort of documentation, but merely a personal one, for work management purposes. Other kinds of documentation are naturally needed, and another chunk is devoted to those different kinds; what to write where—in my detailed and highly structured compilation of results, in the books I write on the subjects, material for homepage and blog, and so on. When my brain is emptied of creativity, I look there to know what ought to be written in different places, with hints on how. As you see, the overall structure contains everything needed to keep the process going, regardless of state of mind.
There is more, but since everybody must be bored stiff by now, maybe it’s time to finish this description.
All in all, y’all see how Agenda’s ingredients can be used to give an extensive documentation of virtually every thought that has been thought whilst researching. The potential is all built in Agenda, only the ideas how to use it in each one’s preferred manner have to be added. And the work, of course.
Hi Antonio - I’m really interested in your workflow. I acknowledge your post is a few months back, but I’m just new to Agenda so just finding it now. I’d love to know more about your workflow and even see it in action - is that possible? It’s just hard to comprehend exactly how it all works with just the text description.
I also use it for my research.
I tried other methods and software but Agenda‘s flexible nature and date based note taking still trumps everything.
I‘m not that great at organising and structuring my notes and I also realised that I tend to struggle dealing with too much structure. So I limit the amount of project categories/subcategories. Having all notes relating to a specific project in one category gives me a great overview of its progress and timeline.
I use Apple Pencil / sketching for ad hoc conceptual purposes, for brainstorming/mindmapping and structuring my thoughts.
I switch to typed text when I am documenting my work, for longer text (paragraphs etc) or for creating lists. Sometimes, I will also paraphrase my handwritten notes.
I love Agenda‘s ability to link notes to calendar events (meetings).
