I am returing to give Agenda another try before my premuim expires.
Is there a way that I would see all my work in-process/overdue notes or tasks compiled on “Today”, “On the Agenda”, or any other custom built page/view?
My goal is when open Angenda is to pick up where I left off. I prefer not to flip through previous days to see if I didn’t finsh tasks/notes.
Thanks,
Kyle
Hi Kyle,
This sounds like what on-the-agenda is intended for. You put things on the agenda (yellow dot button), and leave them there until you don’t need to work with them anymore. Then you take them off the agenda. That way, just going to On-The-Agenda should show you what you have been doing, and what you need to finish.
Today is useful for notes with a time element. Eg a meeting. If you put a date on those notes, you can see them in the Today tab.
You can create your own saved searches too. Select “Search All”, and search. You can search based on text, date, or on-the-agenda status. Once you have the search, save it, and give it a name. Eg. search for any notes that have a date in the last 2 weeks. Save it as “Recent Past”. Good way to check you didn’t forget something.
Kind regards,
Drew
OTA is basically a flag, or a tag that you don’t get to name. You could create a tag called #ota to serve the exact same purpose. So I look at OTA as a flag that I have easy access to, but it doesn’t necessarily have a specific meaning for me.
The primary benefit of OTA vs tags imo is easy access – there’s a keyboard shortcut to toggle it which you don’t get with tags, you can add / remove multiple notes at once, and the OTA saved search appears at the top of the overview. So that’s why I prefer to use tags to build up coarse-grained collections of notes, and then use OTA to focus on a smaller set of notes within / from those collections.
Tags, on the other hand, provide a second axis with their parameter. So you can create tags like #WIP(urgent) and #WIP(important) giving you a way to find all WIP notes in a single #WIP search, or zoom in on urgent or important WIP notes by searching for #WIP(important). Or my favorite, adding dates to tags like #due(3 days) and setting up a saved search to see anything overdue, due in the next week, due in the next month, etc.
Personally I typically treat OTA as a sort of group of items to focus on for today or even the next work session. I don’t want something lingering OTA for more than a day. So I find tags are really good for these kinds of open loops. I’ll add a tag called #WIP and then do a saved search for notes matching those tags. So I can look at any #WIP notes and add them to the agenda for the day, along with any other notes that I want on the Agenda (I frequently have notes on the Agenda that are purely for quick reference purposes).
That said, you can come at it from the other side – use OTA to flag everything relevant for the day (or week…) and then create a #focus tag to pick out specific notes to focus on for a specific time period. I’ve done both, and am happy to change approach on a whim.
OTA works as expected. I had not used Agenda for months so started populate it with test data (old software QA habbits never die as I do that for living). I have kept up with all the updates though.
OTA continued to be blank and checking bullets for task completion would result in hanging Agenda.
I removed the app and its supporting system files and reinstalled it… It seems to work as you guys mentioned.
My next learning is to find out how to use Today… I will need to dig in.
I want to use Agenda as a mini projects / day planning instead of OmniFocus what I have used in the past several months. I like to simplify and use Agenda with Mac Remindar since is so easy to use Reminder via Siri while driving or traveling.
One last note, the support here is exceptional so thank you!!
Here’s a recent response to someone asking about the difference between OTA and Today. I don’t want to try to steer your approach too much – I get the most value from finding my own way to use Agenda – but that post does illustrate some of the mechanics of using the two ideas.
Funny, last night I decided set aside OmniFocus to try Agenda again for that sort of planning. I was skeptical but it worked well… I’m going to continue the experiment. Let us know what you find!
Curious : what is your thinking is or what benefit do you get when you tag notes as #due(3 days) vs just assigning a date three days from now on a note and using the built in searches, e.g. “this week”?
I found a way to add emails from Mac Mail to Agenda via Reminders and create a reminder which was really good…
The next Challenge with Agenda is to have it keeping overdue tasks in Today
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That’s a good question. When using a date-based tag and an accompanying search, Agenda will return all notes that are tagged with that date or earlier. So if I tag something #due(Jan 21) and have a saved search of #due(today), then that note will appear in that saved search until I either remove the note or advance the date.