I have just joint the agenda community. If you guys can build ability to extract todo’s in separate view - I will be happy as hell
We have a few ideas about improving how you work with todos, including separate notes and search features. Stay tuned!
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Really hoping you develop more todo functionality. Seems like a major gap in Agenda. Given that mostly, my timeline is about managing things-I-have-do-get-done (usually relative to outcomes in meetings)… I’m shocked Agenda doesn’t actually help in this regard!!
Here’s my wish list to make Agenda useful for me:
- Must be able to search/view all incomplete todo (unchecked) items
- Using Reminders integration is not sufficient; too cumbersome, too error prone (what if I forget to add a reminder?), too cluttered (one huge list? meh)
- Integrate with better GTD tools (OmniFocus!) would be awesome
- Should be able to have ‘views’ on todo items, e.g., ‘all unchecked todo’, ‘all unchecked in project X’, ‘unchecked due in next X days’ etc.
- Would be pretty spiffy to have #4 visually presented on a calendar or timeline
A lot of what you’re asking can be done with GoodTask, which uses Reminders as a database. That way you can create todos in Agenda, and they show up in GoodTask - you can then organize them however you like, and create views (I think GoodTask is more powerful than even OmniFocus, although I use that to create extremely simplified views).
Alex & Drew have said many, many times that they intend to do more with to-dos, which people have been asking for for quite a while - they’ve just had other things be higher priority. I’m looking forward to what they come up with! So far, I’ve found all of their additions to be well-thought out and helpful in doing my work. We just have to be patient 
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We do have plans to allow for more powerful control over presentation of notes. Eg getting summaries that only show unchecked etc. That will probably be tackled with changes to the search system.
Some of the requests seem a little contradictory. Eg. If you are using OmniFocus for task tracking, why would you use Agenda for that too? Ie you either want better integration, or you want Agenda to take on more of the same tasks as OF does now.
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Well — two points: First of all, I use Agenda largely for meetings and meeting outcomes. There are other to-do’s in my world. Work on my boat. Plan on travel stuff. Buy some things when I’m at the market. That doesn’t go into Agenda, it goes into my GTD solution, which is OmniFocus. OmniFocus (and Reminders, for that matter) is very good at managing those kinds of to-dos, including reminding me at the right time, showing me what hasn’t been done, and even reminding me when I arrive somewhere. That said, (second point), if Agenda was better at managing, viewing, finding, and resolving my to-do’s, I could easily see using Agenda + Reminders as my total solution. But right now, it’s not quite there. To-dos can “hide” in Agenda. The integration with Reminders is good though. That’s made a big leap forward… I’m still trying that out, and looking forward to seeing how it works.
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I moved away from OmniFocus lately and am using only Agenda now. I used the shortcut created by @heyscottyj to document the things I have done. I now run a shortcut at the start of the day and create a note (on the agenda and linked with the current day) with events of the day and add TODOs in it. However not every TODO is completed that day. At the end of the day I use a shortcut to remove the note from the agenda and collapse it. So the unfinished TODOs are not visible anymore.
I could add a reminder for each TODO and add the list of reminders to the note at the start of the day, but not every TODO needs a reminder.
Therefore, it would be helpful, if there was a possibility to extract unfinished TODOs from a note by x-callback.
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Thanks for the suggestion, we hope to add the callbacks to read from Agenda in a future update indeed.
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In the interim, you could make a Shortcut that you run on a note to grab the todos, and then add them to a new note? Or something like that.
So just checking back in…
Since writing this, I dropped Agenda in favor of a pretty simple workflow using Apple Reminders and Apple Notes. It’s going quite well actually – but I do miss a few of the features of Agenda (linking my notes directly to meetings being one of the top).
I thought I’d give Agenda another look…
I’m disappointed this kind of functionality still hasn’t been added. It was (and remains) the one highest priority for me. I need a way to manage my unfinished tasks. Agenda, on the other hand, buries my unfinished taks and I have to go hunting for them. It’s not workable.
What’s the point of having “checklist” items if there is no way to find unfinished items?
Have a look at Noteplan App. Task handling is very nice, but it lacks in date assignment. You have separate daily notes (one note file per day) wich are date related and general notes which don’t have a date relation.
You can add completion dates to tasks, have a review “button” to see all open tasks from all notes with one click. A mini calendar, where alle dates with a daily note are indicated and calendar integration.
The only thing thats keeps me from using Noteplan is the limitation of only one date related note per day. I like to have my notes assigned to dates so see what has been written down when. And export functionality is limited.
Is there a way to quickly copy unselected items on the iPad version?
Thanks.
The keyboard command as it exists is not yet available on iOS/iPadOS, we do however have some improvements planned for the next major update in this respect.
Any plans on this feature? This is crucial to my use case.
I am mainly using Agenda as a jotting and TODO notes. I want to know what has been planed but missed from previous days. Having this feature is much more lightweight than moving to other reminder apps since I do not want to assign a specific date or time to it.
We will undertake a major search and filtering overhaul in future. It has been planned for a while.
For now, I would recommend putting notes like this on the agenda, and remove them when they are done. If you don’t want to clutter On-the-Agenda, you could instead use your own tag (eg #unfinished), and have a saved search overview for that tag. This allows you to quickly go through and see if there are open issues.
Agenda is my primary app for notes after trying many tools over the last several years , but task filtering continues to be the one area that I still struggle with daily.
I realize this is on the roadmap, but if not too far along, you might consider doing something similar to Dropbox Paper’s handling of tasks. The app satisfies only the basic note taking needs (vastly inferior to Agenda), but the task filtering is everything I hope Agenda will someday implement. In short, here is a list of key features:
- Quickly show all uncompleted tasks from all notes (Paper calls them Documents) in collapsable sidebar by clicking on a single icon
- Ability to mark tasks complete from the sidebar
- Clicking on a task in the sidebar takes you directly to the task in the note
- The task sidebar is accessible from any note via the top menu button, allowing you to quickly navigate to the next open task
- Tasks can be filtered to the current note, assigned to me, assigned to others, or completed
- Tasks can also be grouped by note for all notes, or grouped by due date.
While I do use the Reminders integration, I believe the features mentioned would be welcomed by most users, and are lightweight enough to avoid the pitfall of building out a full task management application within Agenda.
Interested to hearing your feedback if you’ve had a look at Paper, or any additional details about what is planned.
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These features sound like they belong to a dedicated task manager, rather than a notes app. We are certainly planning features to help with filtering tasks, but would probably handle things differently to the points in the list.
It is very unlikely we would move tasks to the sidebar on the left. That is for projects and overviews. The tasks would remain part of the content of notes, just like now.
What we do plan to allow is filtering such that you can choose to only see incomplete tasks in notes. We would also improve search, so you could make a saved search such as “all incomplete tasks”. If you clicked on that overview, you would see a list of all notes with incomplete tasks, and it would also filter back the text to just show the tasks in question, hiding all other text.
This seems like it is the right approach for Agenda. You still work with notes, in the same way you do now, but you can choose to “hide” irrelevant details, and use powerful search to narrow down to the notes you want.
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This sounds really helpful.
I realise you don’t want to turn Agenda into a fully fledged task manager, and all the expectations that would create. However, for me one of the attractions of Agenda is that it is “good enough” at dealing with tasks that I can keep track of most tasks in Agenda, and not have the cognitive overload of a separate task manager to deal with.
That said, at the moment Agenda is only just “good enough”! The features you outline would definitely take Agenda up a notch, and reduce my fear of loosing important tasks buried in notes.
Hi,
Notes are completed or they’re not. If a note contains tasks and they’re all “done”, it’s “completed” - it won’t pop up in searches if you don’t want to.
If there’s anything relevant in it still, you can split it and keep the spin-off as not-completed.
Searching could be improved overall. It is hard to see how task management could be without impacting existing work-flows. Consistency is not unimportant.
Rob