Agenda versus Bear

I use both Bear and Agenda… Bear is really nice for longer notes with a lot of formatting to it, notes that I intend to keep around. Agenda is great for the day to day scribbles that need to correlate to specific events or projects, and will be erased as soon as I’m done with them. Bear is more of a writing app while Agenda is more of a day planner. Both great.

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Good point. I forget how provincial I can be.

However, is likely that OP has to comply with some kind of data protection and/or privacy law o regulation. If not, is nice to remind OP that this information is very sensible so it shouldn’t be up in the cloud.

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Ok. Yestedray I tested Notes app(apple) and see an interesting thing. After sharing a note or pdf from another app to the Notes, I saw duplicated note in Notes instead of one !

Notes are well-known for unpredictable twists like this one. I tried to use them to organize my patients data (I practiced as endocrinologist) and it turned out pretty nightmarish. In the end I switched to Evernote on my Mac and iPad.

I liked Evernote, despite it’s unfriendly user interface (IMHO), but 5 months later the my iPad app crashed and when I restarted Evernote, I discovered, that all my notes were gone. Support couldn’t help, they tried their best, but it was a rare server glitch and I was among the very few “really lucky”. I had a backup, but I couldn’t really put myself to use Evernote anymore, so I switched to Scrivener.

Actually, Scrivener is a writing tool, but I could make folders and subfolders and attach images. It wasn’t bad, though lack of calendar integration did hurt. In the meantime I changed my job to cognitive based psychoterapy and soon discovered Agenda. I was wary, because years ago I was sorely disappointed in the release version of Papers 3 (Papers 2 were my favourite library app for quite some time), but decided to give Agenda a shot. So far, I’m satisfied, because the app is mostly stable and developers actually develop it. As soon as they released iOS app I bought premium version to support the development.

I loved the sync with the calendar, because I connected all upcoming client sessions to calendar events in a few clicks. For the first time in years I feel my practice more or less organized and I’m waiting eagerly for updates.

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I’m confused to selection of an app for my patients dossier too. In testing Agenda I saw a very simple text color , impossible images attachment and other faults. But speed syncing, back up feature, @drewmccormack is a professional in their team( #studies helped me in my postgraduate studies) and good support are its good features.
But waiting for the future updates !
Dr ! Have you tested Notability for note taking too? It is a good app too. Any idea ?

@ghmotlagh It looks for your needs OneNote from Microsoft may work well. I like the photo-text integration of it and it’s easy to create notebooks and subfolders within.
Trello may be another option for more structure in your projects if you want to add a timeline of work done/doing/to be done.

I just started trying Agenda and it seems great for project note taking and planner, like a ‘work journal’ to capture your ideas and plan follow ups. It would be great if it had PC integration as well since laptops are still widely use for ‘heavy-duty’ work not available in mobile or Mac…

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Id prefer Agenda over onenote. @drewmccormack is a professinal man and so I’ll wait for Agenda updates.

I totally agree. It even exports the tags by default. It’s difficult to organize in Bear, so I’ve taken to using it more for simple notes. I use Ulysses for more structured and longer-form writing, and Agenda for my professional meeting- and project-oriented efforts.

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I have found myself evolving to the same approach. One important point you make is, ‘so I’ve taken to using it more for simple notes’. There is no shame in “simple notes!” A tendency with app developers is that as soon as it has a decent text editor, it aspires to be a do-it-all writing platform. I think Bear fell into this trap.

Right now I’m positioning Ulysses for larger scale writing projects that I want to have permanence, and Agenda for “simple notes” that will may evolve to a larger-scale project, in which case they “move” to Ulysses (or some other app), or that have some chronological significance, in which case Agenda is really serving as a notebook that preserves that timeline.

Just when I reach a point at which I’m tempted to stop using Agenda and do everything in Ulysses, I realize that I still have a need for “simple notes.” As long as Agenda stays focused (which the developers keep acknowledging), I think there’s purpose for both apps.

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Seems like Evernote would suit you here.

Oops

If I may add my opinion, my possible suggestion would be the use of Ulysses, which has no limit including any type of document in a very structured way

I checked out Bear, and did like it for a collection of undated notes. But it fell short in terms of dated notes, which for me, is one of Agenda’s absolutely killer features.

Over the years, I’ve learned that I have two basic types of notes: dated and undated notes. Undated notes represent information that’s subject to change. For me it’s a sort of personal wiki. I might have a note that lists books I want to read or have read, or my current thinking on a specific work topic. For that sort of stuff, Bear works nicely.

Dated notes are obviously more tied to specific dates. Traditionally that has been a record of what happened, when. But this is where Agenda introduces something truly innovative as far as I’ve seen. You can attach notes to specific calendar events, or date ranges.

So I’ve got a meeting on Friday, and as the week goes on I have some things I want to talk about in that meeting. I create an Agenda note for the meeting, and as ideas come up I add them to that note. Before the meeting, I clean things up, turn items into checklists so I can track what I’ve talked about, etc. Then add in thoughts / responses to questions as the meeting goes on. That’s pretty slick. I am always extremely well-prepared for meetings, and it takes almost no time to do so. It’s a hell of a secret weapon :slight_smile:

But I also have things that span longer periods of time, like goals I’m working towards over the next 3-12 months. I can create a single note to represent that goal, and assign it to a date range. Now when I look at a specific day or filter on a date range, I’ll see all the notes that apply to that timeline. So given how I’ve organized things, I see a list of my yearly goals, quarterly goals, weekly goals, and daily goals all in a single view. That sort of context around my thinking and work is something I’ve wanted badly for a long time, and took me a little bit to wrap my head around with Agenda because it’s new to me. But now that I’ve seen what it can do I’m thrilled with it.

So Bear is good for undated notes, and date-specific apps like Day One or any app that lets you reset the “created” date is pretty good for dated notes. But, I’ve always run into the problem – where did I put that thing? Was it undated information that lives in Bear? Or dated information that lives in Day One? And where does new information go? As long as I keep everything in those two places it can work okay… but I still felt a lot of frustration trying to track down what went where, and often times where to put new stuff. Plus, all of the dated information apps that I’ve seen only let you assign notes to a single date (which sometimes feels hacky, like overriding the created at date). They don’t let you assign notes to a calendar event or date range, like you can do with Agenda. That really is killer.

I’m not looking for “one app to rule them all,” but I do desperately want a single source of truth for my notes. Agenda is really close on that front – it just needs some fixing of permalinks (which the developers are aware of), and then I can trust it to store my highly-linked, undated notes in addition to my dated notes. And from that point on, anything they add is just a bonus to me.

So my take is, if you care about dates and events at all then you absolutely cannot beat Agenda. But if dates and events mean nothing to you in terms of note-taking – and I really do mean nothing – then Bear is probably more compelling because of its hierarchical tag organization.

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I know this is a very old post and I’m not a fan of necro-posting, however there may be others with similar use case/need and therefore thought I’d add my two-cents.

Bear

  • Organization:
    • Bear supports deeply nested tags and that should suffice for most needs in terms of organization.
    • Bear supports wiki like syntax to link notes together (like agenda allows)
  • Security: The latest beta also has single note encryption which is a boon for securing patient data.
  • Content: Bear allows attaching images. Formatting is easy and the “highlighting” function is cool to mark up important sections.

Agenda

As you can see from the short list above, Bear is quite versatile and could surely serve well for this intended purpose.
However, having said that, and if I were a physician with this need/use case, then I would 100% opt for Agenda for the following couple of reasons (off the top of my head)

  • Organization:
    • Most physicians I know work at multiple practices and therefore Categories for each practice and project for each patient would work extremely well;
    • Agenda’s date focused approach would be ideal to track notes on the date/time the patient had his appointment;
    • Agenda’s related view would help bring to light similar cases with other patients etc.
    • Hook a note to a future appointment to remind yourself to review something pertaining to that patient or use reminders integration for this too;
  • Content: You’re able to add images and the available formatting options should suffice for most situations

I guess, the main advantages of Agenda here are almost all pertaining to organization and structure, but with many patients, organization will ultimately be king!

Hope this helps others too.

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I would love to see Agenda using tags like Bear does and also how 1Password does. Bear uses the tags as “folders & sub-folders”, 1Password has a collapsible Tag section with all the tags. I feel more people are using tags these days… 2 cents…

Hi Pat, would you be willing to go into more detail about your use of agenda with long term goals? I’m still figuring Agenda out and having trouble wrapping my head around how to use it in that way as well.

I forgot another very obvious organization boon with Agenda. The person tag is a great way to refer to patients in notes outside a patient project. Maybe a global task list or something.

Hey, sure.

I have a category “goals,” with one project for the main areas of my life in which I want to grow. Inside each project I have a stickied note called “[area] goals,” which is a brain dump of different things that I think are interesting or exciting, that would focus my time and energy toward that part of life.

Then I pick a goal and choose a time frame to work towards it. It could be a few weeks, months, or even years. I set the date range for the note to match the time frame. Now when I look at the “today” view, I see those high-level goals right at the top of my notes. Each one contains some information about the goal, such as why I want to do it, success criteria, or steps to take or key milestones on the way to accomplishing it (which I represent as check lists). I don’t have a strict structure for this, it’s very ad-hoc. I have different levels of clarity for different goals, based on how much I’ve thought about them and the work I’ve done so far.

Clearly I can’t accomplish a long-term goal today, so I’m left with the question – what, if anything, am I going to do today to get closer to that goal? In the simplest form, I might have an actionable item listed in the goal note itself. If that’s the case, I add the note to the agenda for the day, and work on the action item when I get a chance. If I don’t have anything immediately actionable, I need to do some more planning. This means taking one of the milestones from the goal note, and making a new note for it. I treat it the same way… braindump different things I can do to get towards this goal, work out a plan for how to get there. I assign a time frame for working towards it, so it shows up in Today view.

The result of this is that when I look at Today, I see all of the goals that I want to be my guiding focus, along with the smaller goals / milestones / objectives / whatever you want to call them, that will help get me there. Most goals have actionable notes at the second level (first sub-goal), and so far I haven’t had to go more than three levels. It gives me a high-level overview of my plan: my top goal is on top, and the next action to take is in the note itself or the note immediately below it. Then I’ve got the next goal, and so on.

If I don’t have anything actionable, that’s interesting to look at. Do I not have any ideas about how to accomplish that goal? Am I resisting the work involved? Am I note actually motivated by that goal? Maybe I’ve just been too busy to work out the next steps required.

So, that’s the basics of how I do it. I’m only about 6 weeks in to my Agenda use, so of course it’s subject to change. However, I am really enjoying it, it supports the way I think. I find it very natural, and as I get new ideas about how to think about goal setting and project planning, Agenda continues to pleasantly surprise me with how well it adapts. In fact something about its approach has helped me come up with ideas for how to plan that I’ve never had before, while solving problems I’ve had for years (“what have I done?” “what do I plan to do?” “how the !@#$ am I going to get all this done?”).

A couple more thoughts…

I treat projects, or specific objectives that I need to accomplish, the same as goals. So here are two examples:

  1. I’m on a committe that was tasked with drafting a document and preparing it for a meeting next month, and I volunteered to do the initial work. I created a project “committee document” and a pinned note “present document at September meeting.” I set the date range from the day we received the assignment, to the day of the meeting, so it shows up on “Today” every day between now and then. I wrote my key milestones as a checklist, and recorded pertinent information in other notes in the project. I’m done with a week to spare, and it feels good :slight_smile:
  2. I am chairing another committee, a commitment that will last for around two years. I don’t know a whole lot about what it entails, it’s the first time I’m doing it. I created a project “committee chair” with a pinned note “serve as committee chair” and set the date range from the day I accepted the position, to the day it ends almost two years out. Then I wrote down some key steps that I want to take… the first of which is introducing myself to the ~60 volunteers of this organization, and verifying their contact info. That is a LOT of calls to make! (for me anyway). So, I started by making a note, transferring everyone’s contact info into it, and making each person’s line a checkbox, and linking to the phone list note from my main pinned note. I’ve just been going down the list, calling and texting people, and noting the contact date alongside their name. When I actually get ahold of someone, I check off their name. I have a few more key milestones to take that I’ve treated the same way, and there will be many more that come up.

When I look at my Today view, I see my goals, projects, milestones, objectives… all really different names for the same kinda thing. But each one has different time frames, or levels of clarity or specificity, or importance. As I go through the list and decide what I want to work on for the day, I add it to the agenda. One day I might have my main health goal and key action, and the committee document note. Another day I might have my business goal, and the list of people I need to call for the committee chair.

I considered using a #goal tag and setting a future date, so I can see what I have coming up. But, that feels too out of the way for me. I find the Today view to be very natural for my way of thinking. Rather than feeling overwhelmed with irrelevant stuff, I like seeing all of the things that are on my mind in some way. It’s kind of a high-level overview of the shape and direction of my life that day, all the way from my most inspiring goals down to administrative things like interviewing a dog sitter in the afternoon. And I get focus by putting things on the agenda.

The last thing I’ll say is, my planning process with Agenda has been very ad-hoc. I’ve paid attention to various systems over the years (GTD, momentum method, 12 week year, your best year ever), but until Agenda I haven’t really felt effective with planning. GTD has always lacked a time element for me, and not every goal fits neatly into 12 week or 12 month chunks. But the principles that underly them are extremely useful: get an overview of everything I want to accomplish, figure out where to direct energy, come up with steps to get there, set a time frame to accomplish / reevaluate it. Agenda provides just enough structure to fulfill these principles very well, while being unstructured / flexible enough that I can implement them in a way that makes sense to me – which is often pretty messy! So I need something that’s adaptable, and really puts the focus on my own thinking rather than constraining me to a highly structured system.

I realize I’m nerding out pretty hard on Agenda. That’s because for me it really is a sort of “missing link” that I’ve felt with productivity and planning for years. So if I can help someone else along with some of the same challenges I’ve experienced, or at least give them some new ideas, I’m grateful to have the chance to do so. And from all accounts, this is still the early days for Agenda, and there’s a lot of good stuff in store.

p.s. the first project I accomplished with the help of Agenda planning was getting my yard from brown to green. It involved measuring the amount of watering done twice a week, with pictures so I could track progress and have a before / after shot. So it’s not all big, life-changing stuff :slight_smile: In fact it might be best to start with something small, objective, and meaningful.

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That’s a brilliant write up Pat, thank you so much for sharing this in such detail!

Ps. I noticed the zzz Archive category in your screenshot, we hope to have a nice solution for that later this year.

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