For me, the thing that’s missing is that there’s a difference between a “Due Date” and a “Do Date.”
Example: I have to deliver a report in advance of a meeting on Tuesday. If I don’t, I will make work harder for a lot of people, and they’ll be pissed at me. That report has a “Due Date” of Tuesday.
I also want to clean my garage on Saturday, which is when I think I’ll have time to do it. The exact time doesn’t matter – it could be in the morning or afternoon. And if I don’t do it at all, nothing really happens. Cleaning my garage has a “Do Date” of Saturday.
So I want to assign the report a due date of Tuesday, and have some red alert mechanism showing me that it’s coming up and that I need to have it done. I want to assign cleaning my garage a do date of Saturday, and have some casual mechanism showing me that it’s coming up and I plan to do it that day.
You’ve suggested using tags to indicate that something is “todo”, but afaik tags apply at the note level, not at the checklist or line-level. So my options in Agenda to mark something as “todo” are to 1) create a whole new note specifically for that todo or 2) view the entire note in my todo saved search.
Maybe I’m missing the point of reminders, and my request is really just about check-list filtering. But, it seems to me like that really starts to move in a direction of re-implementing a task app. Because for example, I really like using OmniFocus to be able to view all the calls I need to / can make, chores, work-related tasks at my computer, etc. I would love to be able to create items in Agenda and have them show up in OmniFocus so that I can tag and filter them there, and have them be checked off in both places regardless of where I check it off. And I’m really skeptical of Agenda being able to provide me a perspective of “Next actions that I want to do today organized by tags," without getting super bloated / taking a really long time / being a mediocre duplicate of what OmniFocus already does (which I know you don’t want to do anyway).
So maybe this is a long-winded way of joining the chorus who desire undated reminders, and eager to see what you come up with
@Pat_Maddox, I use the Calendar app to record activities that I plan to do on a particular date. These “maybe” events are entered into a “Planned” calendar, color-coded yellow. Hard commitments (appointments, deliverables, etc.) are entered on another calendar, color-coded blue. This scheme allows me to better manage my time by block-scheduling, while ensuring that I do not lose sight of the hard commitments. If something comes up that requires me to re-structure my calendar, I can quickly drag the Planned events to new time slots, making room for a new commitment.
I share your yearning for one time/task/small project management application to rule them all. Having excellent calendar, task manager, notes and file management in one app would be great. I’ve never seen it happen in a way that was compelling to me. If Apple would build tight integration among Notes, Reminders, Files, Calendar and Contacts, that would probably be enough for all of us, but they always stop a few steps short.
I like the approach that Agenda is taking. The notes app becomes the task/time management hub, with good integration with Calendar, Reminders, and Contacts. That makes sense to me. I don’t expect Agenda to include all of the other apps’ functionalities, but I would like to see workflow-friendly links to the external apps that self- update when a change occurs on either side of the link. I agree that adding the ability to link undated tasks to Reminders would help to smooth the integration workflow.
For capturing random thoughts in Agenda, you might want to use a diary project with a note for each day. If you name it so it’s the first project of the first category (mine is in the category “0. Planning” and project @Diary), it’s always easy to find. At the end of the day, you can review those and create notes in the appropriate projects to elaborate on the thought or simply create a dated reminder about it.
In my case, since I use Omnifocus (OF), if I want to capture a task and I’m in a note about it, I copy a link to the note, usually using cmd-shift-L, then use the global quick entry shortcut for OF to type a quick task thing and put the link to the Agenda note in OF notes field. I find that fast and quite effective.
One of the core differences you and I seem to have in our approach is your assumption that everything I put into reminders will at some point have a date. That reminders are always date driven. This is not true, for me at least. I have location driven reminders and true, undated reminders that I want to address when opportunity exists. For example, I might have a list of things to talk to my boss about when I see him. No specific date but I would like the common list. Yes, I could tag each note in Agenda with his name, but then I need to read through each note to find the item I need to speak to him about. Yes, I could create a separate note in Agenda with his name, but now I am doing double entry in Agenda and making things even messier. I look at Reminders as my “in the moment” list to take advantage of opportunity. Agenda is great for capturing the time sensitive information, but until I have line level tagging and a way to summarize those tags it’s still nice to have the rapid access to a list of items, undated that share a common theme (place, person, activity, etc.)
Yes and no, I think there are a number of alternative ways to keep such a talk list within Agenda, in fact that exact type of “next time I see my boss I should not forget to discuss ABC” scenario was even wat led to Agenda in the first place
I think we can make some improvements still that might be sufficient for your needs, but there’s also a chance this kind of workflow simply doesn’t fit too well in Agenda as it is. In the end of the day it’s finding a way that works for you, which might mean some experimenting with alternatives if we don’t go all the way with date-less reminders.
Fair enough. I know you have talked about summarizing. If you ever get to line level tagging, having the ability to create a tag summary note that listed the lines a tag was in (with a link back to the underlying note) would go a long ways to solving this entirely within Agenda. Actually it would totally solve it and be way cool (newly invented technical term) as well.
Yeah, I struggle a bit with unresolved items in Agenda. My “talk with boss” example is that I have a regular meeting, so I attach a note to the meeting an advance, and collect things that I want to talk about. But sometimes the meeting doesn’t happen, and that meeting note can fade into the past. The solution is simple, right? Just review notes from previous meetings before my next meeting. Well sure… but if meetings with my boss were the only thing I had to keep track of, I would use an index card, not Agenda
(btw I’m using this response as a way to think through my soluttion and get ideas from others, more than anything)
So I need some sort of system for gathering unresolved things. A couple things come to mind:
Add a single “things to talk about with my boss” pinned note. When the meeting takes place, cut and paste from that note into the meeting note. Anything that’s unresolved gets cut and pasted back into that note.
Alternatively, treat the pinned note as a scratch note, check off items in it while the meeting takes place, and then cut and paste any finished stuff into the meeting note as a record after it takes place. That could be interesting… although I’ve found a lot of value in working with an Agenda meeting note as it takes place.
Make more use of “Mark note as done.” This will be more useful when we can search for notes based on done status. Still, that is a coarse-grained “did this meeting happen” and still doesn’t account for unresolved items from a note.
Tag any notes that have unresolved items, and process them to transfer unresolved items to new (now unresolved) notes and remove the tag from the original note.
I’ll experiment, but I’m curious to hear other people’s experiences with this sort of thing.
Normally, for each important project I have a note pinned at the top of all notes in that specific project, called TODO with a list of things that, time by time the project is being developed, need to be implemented but they don’t have a precise date for being finalized. And this list is updated continuously. Hope this can help in some way for the”things to talk about with my boss”…
There used to be a wiki app that was ahead of it’s time called Trunk Notes. One of the cool features is had were functions that you could apply. For example I could apply a @summary(tag) function to list out all the lines that had a particular tag. That allowed me to have my notes and reminders where they made sense but I could summarize them in a different note as needed. The flexibility that it brought was amazing.
Sounds powerful. We probably won’t go that far in Agenda, but we like the idea of having some commands. Eg the new \remind command. We may extend that set of options in future.
Note we also have cross note linking, and that is improving on iOS in version 9.0, so Agenda can already be used as a basic wiki.
I seem to be remarkably good at re-visiting dead threads and turning them into zombies: if this is an undesired behavior, please just ignore this post, everyone. My goal is only to add to already-established conversations, but as a new user I am not entirely sure what the conventions are here.
First, the thread above was remarkable. The back-and-forth really made me think about what my use cases are and what works better/best in Agenda. As a university researcher, I have a lot of ideas and tasks (more actionable ideas) that I like to capture as part of the flow of the day. I do a lot in daily notes.
I too wanted the ability to compile incomplete tasks somewhere within Agenda, but I see how that isn’t necessarily desirable. I liked the idea of simply tagging things with something like #todo, so that it can be turned into a \reminder later.
One thing about tags is that they apply to an entire document, even though the tag itself is embedded in a line. Is there a way to see only the relevant line? I can see that Agenda has the notion of the line as an independent unit, like a Notion block, but I don’t see that there’s any way to interact with the line/block apart from formatting and linking. Do I have that right?
As Agenda moves forward, I’d love the ability to interact with lines, or at least to see them compiled in a list so that when I click on #todo in Overviews I see only the lines tagged with #todo and not complete notes.
At least that’s what I think I want. I’m still thinking about this!
One thing about tags is that they apply to an entire document, even though the tag itself is embedded in a line. Is there a way to see only the relevant line?
Not at the moment, but let’s say we hear you all loud and clear
I can see that Agenda has the notion of the line as an independent unit, like a Notion block, but I don’t see that there’s any way to interact with the line/block apart from formatting and linking. Do I have that right?
That’s correct, there’s is no way to collapse a paragraph for example yet.
Paragraph level granularity willraise the implementation / productivity of every feature to the degree that future releases will have to include an exponent.
