Hmmm. I see notes as more than containers for tasks.
I often use notes for brainstorming and trying out ideas and developing my thinking about potential real world projects. I often use dashed paragraphs to visually indicate ‘ideas’ and checklists to indicate ‘actions’.
Also, even with a conventional note with real life tasks, these often get superseded by developments.
And I admit my logic is very fuzzy, but all this means that there isn’t a clear mapping between tasks being completed and a note still being relevant.
I think all I’m saying is there are lots of ways to use Agenda (part of its beauty), and I would find the proposed developments useful!
It sounds like you are focusing on filtering, and that is great. That is what I want more than anything. The rest is nice, but I could see how it might overcomplicate things.
I pictured it as a collapsible sub-panel on the Related panel (like Recently Edited, or Related Notes). The advantage of the sub-panel is that I can see across all notes and quickly navigate to what I need.
I’ve attached a couple of screenshots from Paper. I don’t like their UI at all, and don’t want it re-created, but do believe a (sub)panel has merits. This first shows filtering of Tasks within the current note. The second shows tasks from all notes, within a note.
Clicking on the note name takes me to the top of the note. Clicking on the task, takes me directly to the task in the note, saving me scrolling through a potentially long note to find the task.
I’d be interested to hear other perspectives as well. Maybe I’m the only one this would help their workflow.
I think this approach would add a lot of clutter to the app, and may only be used by a small group of customers. So I don’t think it would fit the Agenda approach very well.
That said, I think you could probably do something very similar with two planned Agenda features:
Ability to move notes/overviews to a separate window
Filtering and searching to allow only unchecked items to be shown
What you would do is setup the search/filter I mentioned, showing all notes with unchecked items, only displaying the unchecked items themselves. You would then open this in a second window. You could click on the notes in the secondary window to bring them up in the primary window (we plan to support this). So you would have something very similar to what you show, without forcing everyone to adopt that approach.
So, I kind of dropped using Agenda (well, I totally stopped using it actually) because the lack of this feature drove me nuts. I kept “losing” incomplete tasks because there was not way to find them.
In general, I think my biggest complaint was the poor search (and, specfically, that important things would get lost – like, to-do items that had not been marked completed).
Thought I’d check back in and see if there’s been any progress. For me it’s a show stopper. I’m hoping there’s better search now?
