Best practices for task management

Talk
#1

I recently came back to Agenda after a hiatus due to going to the “dark size” aka Windows OS. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

I am an avid user of Microsoft To-Do and since I can sync my Exchange 365 account, I was able to test that Agenda -> Reminders -> Microsoft To-Do works. Once I sync my Exchange 365 reminders, then Agenda has access to the various lists and it then becomes a personal choice of which GUI to use - Apple Reminders or Microsoft To-Do.

I’m hoping to get tips and tricks for task management within Agenda for the following topics:

  • Agenda task management: is there a way to search and manage all notes with unchecked checklist items? At the end of the day, I have multiple notes in multiple projects and wanted to have a quick view of all the open items. Any best practices and lessons learned from the Agenda Community?

  • 3rd party reminder support: the integration with reminders are interesting, and I saw where some folks are using Things. If I had to choose between three apps: Apple Reminders/Microsoft To-Do, Things, and OmniFocus, which one would you choose and why? I guess this question is more for folks who have experimenting with all three. Please ignore the Microsoft To-Do component as I’m treating this more from a front-end perspective given the strong coupling with Apple Reminders.

  • Workflow: I’m “struggling” with creating checklist during note creation and having to choose various parameters using the /remind parameters. If I create a general /remind parameter at the end of each checklist entry, and I update the due date in Apple Reminders at a later stage, are the alerts reflected within Agenda (assuming such a feature exists)? Any best practices and lessons learned from the Agenda Community for your workflow - both during note taking creation, and review at a later stage?

#2

Not yet, but we expect that to come sooner rather than later. For now, you can consider managing this yourself. I use the “On the Agenda” yellow dot to indicate when something is still active. That way I can see all the active notes in one place.

I think it depends how you want to use the to-do feature. I actually keep all my extensive task lists in Agenda itself. I use the \remind shortcut to turn some of these into reminders in Apple reminders, so that I get a notification that they are due. But I only do that for tasks that have a deadline.

Yes. Agenda should update to the changes you make in Reminders.

A great place to look is the Talk section. There you will find posts by people who explain their workflow. Quite a varied collection.

#3

Thanks, Drew – this is helpful.

I’m still noodling on my task management strategy, but I’ve already decided to ditch Microsoft To-Do and use Things. I love the quick entry with the autofill feature in Things (something I forgot about having been away from the Mac environment for so long).

My concern with using Agenda to maintain my task list is that they are interspersed between notes. I don’t have a clean way to view all my tasks across all my notes for maintenance and organization. I see what the talk section has, so maybe it adds some clarity w.r.t. using Agenda?

#4

We hear you, it’s indeed a much requested feature to allow to create overviews of all todo items, something we’d like to make possible indeed.

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