Digital Bullet Journaling with Agenda and Shortcuts

Hi all!

I thought I would share this here as a system I’ve set up for myself to bullet journal with Agenda and OmniFocus. Finding it very helpful, hope it’s useful for others, too!

ScottyJ

https://heyscottyj.com/2020/04/02/creating-better-structure-my-digital-bullet-journaling/

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Hi. Love the idea of this but whilst I can get the daily journal to post, neither the rapid log or the end of day appears in Agenda. Brand new to this shortcut thing so struggling to know what to do next.

The rapid log and wrap up shortcuts both expect a particular title for the daily journal notes, so if you’ve changed that title, that will prevent the other shortcuts from appending text.

Hope that helps!

ScottyJ

Hi. Thanks for the response, the note title is just what’s generated from the daily log shortcut I haven’t changed it. Is it something to do with the x-callback that looks to be different in the last script. I did try to change it but then just got an error.

Thanks for taking the time to come back to me.

Hm, interesting.

The x-callback is different in the rapid logger because it appends to a note rather than create one.

That said, I wonder if there may be an issue if you’re not running OmniFocus 3.7, which is currently in TestFlight, just because that’s what I used to make the actions with? I don’t think that should affect anything here, but maybe?

ScottyJ

Great stuff thanks for sharing.

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Thanks @heyscottyj! I finally clicked through on the Agenda community journal email and saw your excellent idea here and linked articles on the Shortcuts integration with OmniFocus. I’m on Things and wondered if the same functions could invoked there in lieu of OF.

Anyone else using Things + Agenda?

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Things has an x-callback-url scheme, so I’m sure the same information could be structured and sent with some editing! Just a matter of knowing that scheme and structure (or a someone who does).

Cheers, and thanks for reading!

ScottyJ

Hi @blakeburris, I took @heyscottyj’s awesome shortcuts and made them work for things with a twist. In things you need to start the process from sharing the today screen. So instead of starting the day in shortcuts, you need to start with your today screen in things and share to the shortcut.

Here is that shortcut Shortcuts

At the end of the day when you are wrapping up, again you start in things and share the today screen and share it, and then run this shortcut Shortcuts.

The caveat is you can’t move your completed items to the logbook until after you run this shortcut.

I hope it works.

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you need to put out more organizational hacks

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Thank you Collin. Just getting around to trying out your shortcut.

Hi!! I’m new to Shortcuts so please bear with me. I’ve decided to do digital bujo and love your idea since I used both Agenda and Omnifocus. I downloaded the shortcuts from your article, but I can’t get any of them to add to Agenda. Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Linda

Hi Linda!

The key is mostly that the Daily Journal shortcut, where everything starts, because it makes the note, expects a particular project in Agenda to add the note to. That project is named towards the end of the Shortcut in a text action (Set as “Daily Journal”).

To make this work, you can either make a project called “Daily Journal” in Agenda, or change the text in the Shortcut to name the project where you would like notes to appear.

Hope this helps, and hope this ends up being useful for you! Would love to hear about how it goes.

ScottyJ

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Hi heyscottyj- thank you for posting this - do you have step-by-step instructions on how to set this in my agenda?

I haven’t done deep documentation about this, no, but what part are you having trouble with?

so for example - how you talk about integrating different apps (Omnifocus) and the shortcuts and the layout in Agenda for recording - sorry new to this so a bit confused. I just got the premium version for the app and I am trying to see how I can best use it for this.

I had created this in OneNote - by no means it is advanced - but if you can help with creating this and automating in Agenda and adding more functionality to enhance productivity - it will be helpful.

Thanks,
Arpan

Ah, I see! Yes, I have a Shortcut that takes the content from an Agenda note and processes any actions (checklist items) in to actions in OmniFocus.

You’d share the content as Markdown from Agenda to this Shortcut to make it happen. It also has a function to email the notes to others.

You can read about how I put this together and get the Shortcut here.

Hope this helps!

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Hi! Love your article. Was wondering if you could more specific about you integrate Agenda and OmniFocus. Love both but don’t want to redundant. Hope you’re still reading these posts :slight_smile:

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This is probably the best rundown I can offer. Hope you find something helpful!

ScottyJ

Perfect! Thank you :grinning:

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