Customer relationship management: Notes, To do, Reminder, and iCal integration

[joycreasey]

Cliffs notes:
I am a sales rep and Apple user needing better customer meeting management and follow up.
I need to take notes in meetings with to-do items that are both scheduled and not scheduled.
Each client needs their own note.
I need to-do items that are NOT scheduled housed in one place for all clients for an “at a glance” of what I need to do.
I need to-do items that ARE scheduled exported to iCal (NOT Reminders) as their own individual events.
I’m hoping there is a way to do this without having to input things twice.

Further explanation: I have a to-do list a mile long that IS NOT date specific and a to-do list a mile long that IS date specific. I need to take notes in a client meeting, create a to-do list within the note particular to that client for reference later, but also I need to have my to do list from all of my notes available in one “at-a-glance” place. I also need to incorporate date-specific items from my notes into iCal, not into Reminders, since iCal is where my appointments are housed and where I manage my scheduled events. I know that I can attach my note to my iCal client appointment as a link. But I need my date-specific to-do item from the meeting to appear as a separate item on iCal, since it is usually on a later date than the appointment. I seem to be able to put it into reminders, but not iCal. I also need to know how I can have all of my non-scheduled To Do’s in one place without inputting them separately? I’m fine to put those into Reminders, but I was hoping I could schedule a different project within Agenda called “To Do” and export line items into it seamlessly.

I’m struggling to have all of this integrate properly, and I can’t imagine it doesn’t exist. These are some examples of my needs to have in my client specific note as well as elsewhere that I am hoping to not have to input independently:

An example of To Do items I would want on a To Do list and notes but not on my calendar:
Contact John when Steven confirms the price.
Research venues for the Smith event.
Follow up with Rhonda after you receive the file.

An example of To Do items I would want on my calendar and notes:
Call Brian at 1:00 Tuesday to follow up on the proposal.
Send links via email tomorrow morning.
Event scheduled 3PM on February 28.

I know that’s a lot of info. I’m hoping it’s clear. If you took the time to read it, thank you!

[mekentosj]

I think what you describe is a good example of the type of workflows where Agenda definitely can be a hub for, however it will also require some trial and error in findings the perfect way for it to work well. There are already a number of threads in the Talk section of Agenda that go into various ways how you can tackle this, for instance this recent one: Suggested solution for my workflow with lots of projects and actionable items?

There are some features on our to-do list for future updates, like the ability to create overviews of unchecked to-do items, but there are alternatives you can try. Two things that immediately come to mind, are to make one project per client and use pinned notes at the top for a “current status and overview”, where for example you could put those follow ups. You could even assign a date or link to a (new or existing) calendar event as a way to concretise the next deadline you set). Have a look at this post which goes into a number of examples: Copy-and-Paste 2.0 – How Templates Make a World of Difference

Second, you might be able to instead of reminders, make much better use of tags, and in particular due tags or tags with parameters, for which you can make overviews.

It’s all a matter of experimenting and fine-tuning I’d say!

[joycreasey]

Thank you! From my “To Do” items in Agenda, is there any way to add a calendar appointment instead of it going to Reminders? I prefer to work from my Apple Calendar instead of Reminders.

[mekentosj]

We on purposely keep events linked to notes and reminders linked to paragraphs inside your notes, if we would start to mix that it becomes very confusing for most users I’m afraid.

[mark.exley]

This is one reason I still have not adopted Agenda. I prefer some of my time specific to-do’s to be in place in my calendar, so I don’t have to flip between Agenda, Reminders and Calendar to see when I can fit something in. I think us customers should be given the option to choose where we want each type of ‘reminder’ to sync to. That way, users that like it how you do it right now see no change, and those that do want/need that functionally can use it.

[mekentosj]

The problem with choice is that it brings more UI, and more choices means more complexity. It’s a tightrope to walk where saying no to a lot of things is unfortunately the hard consequence of keeping the feature bloat out…

[Pat_Maddox]

One thing I think might be helpful on iPhone / iPad would be to allow the sidebar to take up the full screen. I am finding it increasingly useful to use Agenda as my main view of what’s going on today. With the events view truncated though, it’s hard to work out without clicking a bunch of items sometimes. It seems like a useful enough view to me that it would be worthwhile allowing it to expand to take up the full screen and present a really good overview of today.

[mekentosj]

On macOS you can make the inspector quite large, we need to think how this would work on iPadOS and iOS but we’ll consider it.

[Peter_K_Martel]

I just posted what I think is a very close workflow request. I’m sure I don’t fully understand yet what the inticacies are of dealing with Agenda, Calendar and Reminders, but I sure wish I didn’t need to jump around so much, while at the same time I appreciate the integration, mainly because I can use Calendar and Reminders to share events and tasks, and also let Reminders be my on the fly In Box.

That said, joycreasey, you might want to look at BusyCal; it integrates Apple’s Reminders and Calendar (though not required) into one app and places any time and dated Reminders (To Dos) directly into the BusyCal calendar. There is a bit of latency as all the behind the scenes syncing catches up (Agenda <-> Calendar/Reminders <-> BusyCal) but it’s a great solution. Note: it does not convert them into “events,” it just places them on the calendar like an event but with a diffferent outline style appearance (see attached). Note the Reminders show up in. the To Do list on the right. Note the “Call Bob” To To item is also on the Calendar on Wed at 11am

AND, the pricing follows the Agenda model closely (not sure they are keeping what you paid for working forever) buy ($50), get 18 months of upgrades and keep what you bought).

Now if the folks at Agenda and BusyCal would work together, WOW!