Dates applied to note vs. inside the note

Hey everyone,
Im still very new to Agenda, and trying to learn how to best use it to suit my needs. One question I have is this.
I see that if I assign a date to a note, such as ‘today’ it will show up in my ‘today’ search. But if I apply a date to a line or a todo item within a note, the date of ‘today’ wont place the item in the today search results.
So if I want to be able to track daily tasks, and use dates for filtering, each note has to have its own date, which means I have to have a note for each day of the week, which just takes up a lot of space.
The way Im trying to use it is as a makeshift CRM. So I have customers that are each their own project, then I make notes about our phone calls, or requests as to-do items, or reminders to follow up. Then at the end of the week, I filter by ‘this week’ and can use those results to generate a report for upper management. This all works ok, I guess I was trying to come up with a way to have a note for ‘call notes’ and note for ‘account details’ and so on. Then when I add some content to the note, I apply a date to it and can still filter by this week to see the action I took.

Is that clear enough for anyone to provide some insight? thanks!

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That’s a good question, and yeah it’s a bit of a challenge. I’m looking forward to others chiming in to share how they go about it.

As for me, one thing I commonly do is create a single note for an entire week, and put all of the relevant tasks there. If I feel I need more day-to-day granularity, I organize the items into headers for each day within that note - Monday, Tuesday, etc.

I think that the (no idea when it will be released) forthcoming filtering might help with this. You’d be able to tag individual lines as #call(10/17) and then filter lines with those tags on those days. Hard to say though - I believe they’re still thinking through how to implement it, and I’m not sure if date-based tags will be one of the filter parameters. It would certainly be helpful for your use case.

Today, you might consider having a note for each week’s actions - or possibly separate weekly notes for calls and actions, depending on how much you have. Each week you create a new note, transfer any pending actions to it, add new ones, etc.

One thing I particularly appreciate about Agenda is that notes are loosely structured - I can have a single high-level note that maps out milestones for the year, another for key objectives this month, another for this week’s actions, and still another for today’s nitty-gritty. I don’t need that for all projects or all aspects of my life, but essentially I can treat an Agenda note as a versatile sheet of paper, and define any internal organization that I find useful.

A final suggestion: consider drafting an ideal report format outside of Agenda, and then seeing if you can structure your Agenda content to either produce or support you in producing this report. I find it valuable to really clarify my desired outcome without the tool’s constraints, and then see how far the tool can take me. I use Agenda this way all the time - I select a handful of notes, copy as markdown, and paste into a Markdown editor. That gives me a quick rough draft, and from there I can edit it into something useful to others.

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@Pat_Maddox has given an excellent overview already, let me add some views from our end.

Indeed, calendar dates and events can be assigned/linked to a whole note but not individual paragraphs within a note, while reminders are the way to assign (due)dates to individual paragaphs in a note. We on purposely keep this separation to avoid confusing about what to use when, and also to avoid an overwhelming amount of options and associated UI (the two go hand in hand obviously).

Currently there is not yet a way to get an overview of due reminders or unchecked checklist items, both are on our Wishlist to be added down the line.

And alternative is the route that Pat suggested, to use so-called due tags, tags that have an associated date to them. For these you can make smart overviews similar to the today overview.

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I am more than happy to share my snippet used for years on the macOS (current version: Catalina Version 10.15.7 still wroking) – aText. Good news is aText also support Windows as well. And it’s only $4.99.

It would be great if any of you share the snippet which is workable on the iPad Pro.

https://www.trankynam.com/atext/

Pat
Thanks for the info. And sorry for the delayed response. I saw your reply, and have been experimenting with a few things to see if I could make it work, but so far, no luck.
I tried using tags a bit, but they call up the whole note when you filter by tag, so that still doesnt quite work for me.
I get the idea of using one note for each week, but for me, I need to keep the customer notes in the customer project, then just extract the actions taken each week for a weekly report. I do create that externally to Agenda, but calling up the actions from that week is the clincher. The way Im doing it now with each day as it own note does work, it just makes for a very long page of notes under each customer.
I could log each day I guess, but then I’d have to copy and paste each customer specific note from the daily notes to their corresponding customer notes as well, so I can reference them at a later date in one place.
So, Im still trying to improve my workflow.

Thanks for the insider thought process. I’ll have a look at due tags to see if I can make that concept work. thanks!