Having completely separate workspaces or work areas

Good day all,

I am just recently returning to Agenda. Love the app very much, it’s helped me to streamline and focus on being more productive.

Suggestion incoming!!

One thing that I wish was available, was one option the tool I used before coming back had, which was to enable me to have separate workspaces. For example, having a agenda for my work and one for my personal.

Many times I do screenshares and I don’t want to have others see my personal projects alongside my work. So having seapate workspaces to keep those segmented for me would be so aweesome. I’m not aware if that’s possible but I couldn’t fine a way.

This way when I’m at work the only visible projects would be work, I would then select my home workspace and then those would show. Etc.

Thank you guys,

Keep up the amazing work

It is already possible to some extent. Agenda supports Apple’s focus. So you can make a focus state for Work/Home/Presentation etc. You can then assign categories to each focus state, and it will hide the other stuff when in that mode.

Note we also have privacy controls coming soon, which will hide content unless you enter a password. Could also help with sensitive notes and projects.

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I know this is old but I would also love separate workspaces for personal/work. The focus stuff doesn’t really help.

Separate workspaces where Agenda has different Reminders lists and Calendars synced (as well as only displaying certain projects and categories) would be amazing and help with that whole work/life separation that many of us need.

At the moment, I only use Agenda for work because I find being able to see everthinhg in my personal calendars/reminders lists distracting.

This is the one feature that would be a complete game changer for me.

It would be a very big change internally to do that, I think.

One way of doing this in general is to setup a second account on your Mac. You can then have a separate iCloud account and separate Agenda there.

Perhaps not ideal, but that is one way to do it.

Thanks for responding Drew,

I think that might be like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

I have no knowledge around how difficult these things are. I guess ultimately, it’s functionality that would allow us to ‘hide’ certain projects, categories, calendars and reminders from the interface. That alone would be enough and take just a few seconds to be able to configure how things look in a way that would be more conducive to focussed work - but if there was further functionality to save these hide selections as groups, then we have the ‘Work’, ‘Home’ or whatever else makes sense.

I love Agenda, it’s an awesome platform for me that I intend to use long term, this is an enhancement that would just push it that much closer to perfect.

Just wondering why the focus modes don’t help here. I believe you can setup your own, so you could make a “Work” one, and hide the other stuff when you need to. I think this is actually Apple’s preferred approach.

As far as I can tell, the app filters within Focus modes only allow for specific (Agenda) categories to be shown/hidden in a given focus mode. The timeline will still show personal calendar appointments, along with any Reminders lists that are connected. Of course, I could disconnect certain Reminders lists and Calendars each time I sit down to work, to reduce those distractions, but then I’d need to be constantly going in and turning stuff on and off again. I have 14 calendars and a similar number of Reminders lists.

So, for me, this kind of manual approach is not really practical, I’m going to miss stuff - which means I end up just not using Agenda for anything other than one specific workstream, which is a shame.

The workspace idea would effectively build on the current app filters in focus modes and allow me to group my Calendars and Reminders around specific context e.g. a ‘Consulting’ workspace would have specific calendars and reminders shown, as well as the relevant Agenda categories for that work context.

Right. I guess setting up Calendar and Reminders to use the same focus modes doesn’t help in Agenda, right? You still get to see everything?

To me, it sounds like a better solution would be for Agenda to honor the focus modes you have set for the Calendar etc something. Not sure if that is possible or not.

Would that solve your issue? If you could also apply the focus mode to the other apps, and have Agenda honor that in the timeline?

I don’t think Reminders is configurable at all as part of the focus settings, but Calendar is, which seems a little odd.

So yes, if Apple had the required functionality, and Agenda honoured it in the UI, it would solve the issue - but like I say, I don’t think that functionality is available within the focus mode settings right now - maybe something that will become available with future OS releases.

I’ll do more research and if I come across anything useful, I’ll update here. I may also just run an experiment in trying to manage things manually and see what the issues are there.

This is such an elegant solution. I love it!

Edit: after a closer look, it appears the hidden categories only apply to the side bar. It would be great if any notes in those categories were also hidden in the overviews; On the Agenda, Today, To Do.

That would really help when decoupling from work in the weekends!

Also, would be great if the timeline hid my work calendar somehow.

You can choose which calendars are included in the Settings.

Or do you mean that it adapts to your focus setting?

The latter.

Hmm, that’s a bigger ask. We would need UI to assign each calendar to a mode. Will take it along.

Thanks. Personally I would prioritise hiding notes from the projects that are hidden by the focus mode as mentioned here

In other words, the focus mode would apply not only to the sidebar, but also to which notes are visible in the overviews. That way I can leave my work notes in OTA but have them temporarily hidden when my weekend focus mode is active.

So you want On-the-Agenda etc to hide notes not in the current mode? Makes sense. I’ll see what I can do.

Please note that notes that I have hidden using the focus filter are also displayed on the right-hand side under “Recently edited”.

My focus filter only includes the Work category. In this case, private notes in the “Recently edited” list are illogical and incorrect for me.

OK, working to fix that too.

Would be great if someone could test the TestFlight later today and see if this fixes all the issues with focus.

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Tested with v22.2 (388) on iOS and iPadOS.
So far, it works perfectly for me.

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Great! Thanks for letting me know.