Drew -
Thanks VERY much for your comments. You always give a lot of insight into the vision and philosophy of how you think of your product, versus others that tend to be more “sales-like”. To me, the openness of the developers at Agenda is a very strong feature for me, since my background is systems design and software development management. When you talk metadata I’m all ears, because that’s the real key. Translate your vision into a schema early. Development can be gradual and that’s ok, but if your schema is limited or worse, being developed by the seat of your pants, there’s nothing good that can come of that.
I am very curious about how you transitioned from a task management system (I picked on Omnifocus because we both have used it) to Agenda which is basically a note-taking application with nice formatting capabilities. Since our company works on several web-marketing projects at a time with multiple contractors and multiple milestones and delivery dates, we actually struggled in how best to set up lines of communication between everyone. I tend to set the “master schedule” based on project objectives. Those cover development, content management and service. During development is when the schedule is much more critical. I look ahead and plan resources for each project based on need, then set deliverables for the contractors based on the collective need. That way the contractor gets his/her own list of due dates and the items that they have to finish. We’re currently using Asana for this, and it’s a lot of overhead, unfortunately as there is almost no interface to or from it. But I CAN maintain a project schedule that’s communicated to all parties for their use. They they complete their tasks, mark them complete and I maintain a high-level view of everything.
So if you are using Agenda as your “task management” system, and there is no consistent metadata as you pointed out, it seems that you have to rely on the content to communicate the implied metadata. You set up a project on the left sidebar, name it, and then each “note” becomes a “point of interest” where both semantic information is held but also “schedule data”? Those notes with “schedule data” are just highlighted with due(date) kinds of references. That definitely puts a burden on the report mechanism. It also, as you pointed out, begins to demand that a note’s header metadata be rich enough to support things like start date, due date and possibly “assigned-to” functionality for some level of collaboration. As I’ve gleaned from you and others, that might be running outside the lines of what Agenda it all about.
If nothing else, Agenda has revealed a critical need in my personal and professional management of information of a note application. I had used Evernote in the past, like many, because it was the only real solution robust enough to be in that space. But it’s grown and gotten unwieldy. Yet, everyday I pump things into it especially via scans of documents (we’re evaluating DevonThink as a possible help here). Apple Notes wasn’t even on my radar until I began using Agenda. Neither was Bear. Now those are popping up as “island” solutions for some, especially seeing that Apple has recently committed to enhancing Apple Notes further (i.e. witness the 11.0 functionality enhancements).
Again thanks for your insight. If you could just briefly give examples of how you’re using Agenda now in tagging and logging tasks in your system, that would be incredibly valuable.
). It really would help to see what is overdue at a glance.
