Best practices for task management

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?

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.

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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?

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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Hi. Has this feature been added? Or, is there a good workaround for it?
Thanks!

Nope. I think it may be two major versions away. The next major version’s focus is on shared notes, and possibly the next one after that will have the overview improvements.

For now, the approach that seems to work for most people is to add a tag to notes with open tasks, like #wip or #todo, make a saved search for that tag, and just review the notes for tasks.

Hi. Thanks for writing. I thought that might be the issue. I did create a To Do tag. The problem is that, when I do this, the full note where I placed the tag appears in the pinned To Do. I was hoping there is a way to limit what appears there, or that only the sentence with the tag appears. I just did this morning a meeting note, and I put my tag at the end of the note with my “next steps”. The full note then appeared in Agenda and I had to do a long scroll.

Plus, oddly enough, when I schedule the reminder, all that appears in my calendar is “To Do”. I do get the Agenda link, but was wondering if there was a way to change that.

Otherwise, I might have to stick with Things.

Yep. See my reply to the thread you started.

What calendar app do you use? It could be that.

Perhaps open Reminders.app and see how the reminder is displayed there.

Check out this post for instructions on how to add a reminder. It should pick up the text of the line that the cursor is on.

If you still have trouble, I suggest you make a screengrab of how you create the reminder, and we can troublesheet the flow.

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Thanks. Just saw the post. I created it first and subsequently found this thread on the site.

I use Fantastical as my calendar. I added a second reminder on Agenda and tried to see how it came out in both Fantastical and Reminders. Here are screenshots. the first one stayed a

The first one stayed as “To Do” in both Fantastical and Reminders. As for the second one, the tag got converted to text in both.

Thanks again!

I am trying to figure out how to use Agenda for project management as well. I don’t use Agenda much for notes (prefer iA Writer and GoodNotes 5). The problem is Agenda does not have the ability to create reoccurring events (e.g., quarterly reports) or dependencies.

I tried Things 3 but that app was complete garbage and got refunded for it. No ability to export the complete details of completed of tasks (due dates, notes, sub tasks, etc) was extremely infuriating.

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