Hey All! I’m about 2 weeks in to using Agenda and at first I thought I had an idea what “On the Agenda” meant, but now that I have a little more experience it seems basically like a “tag” or “favorite” you can give a note.
My first thought was that if you set a note to a future date, then when that date comes to pass that note would automatically put itself “On the Agenda” so that you had easy access to enter notes in on it that day.
I also thought possibly any notes set for “today” would show on the agenda and once today was over they would automatically just leave the agenda.
I now know that you have to put notes on the Agenda manually (unless you have the “Mark New Notes as On the Agenda” checked) and then you have to manually remove them afterward. It seems like it’s basically a “Mark this note as Favorite” feature (which isn’t bad, mind you).
So curious how people are using this exactly? Just seeing if there is a cool workflow I’m not fully understanding in my limited experience so far. Thanks for any help!
So far, Agenda has become my “project journal” where I take detailed notes about what I did on a project, where I left off, and what I need to do next, and it’s super useful in that way.
OtA gives me an overview of projects I should concern myself with - active projects. The notes in the list contain project-planning. It’s a kind of general overview.
Linked to the various planning points on them are notes that reside under the projects themselves. They contain the specifics like to-do’s, documents, ideas, drafts etc. Some but not many of these are dated in the future (mostly for tomorrow) and will pop-up in the “Today”overview accordingly.
So every day I go down the “Overview list”; “What’s on the Agenda?”, then “What’s on for today?” and from there to the specific notes.
You are right: it is a manually curated list of what is important to you right now.
The way I use it is to have quick access to any notes relevant to the projects I am working on at the moment. When I start on something, I would typically seek out important notes, perhaps in very different projects, and put them all on the agenda. Then I can go to On the Agenda and find all the important notes very quickly.
Today and other overviews may be more useful if you have very date driven projects. Mine tend not to be attached to particular deadlines, so I manually choose what to make important for a week or so. When I’m done, I remove those notes from the Agenda, keeping the list to under 10 or so.
Hi @cyberbobcity and welcome on board!
I personally use Agenda for note taking for my university courses. I’ve found out a quite interesting workflow using OtA, timestamps and Saved Search.
Every morning I open Meeter to join the course, then open Agenda on my saved search “Quaderni odierni” (today’s notebooks) where each note is a lesson, linked to the proper calendar event.
The saved search filters all notes that are “today” and OtA et voilà I have the notebooks I need for the day.
When the lesson’s over I remove the appropriate note from OtA so it is automatically sorted back in it’s project and leaves the other course’s notebooks ready for the next lesson.
Since the lessons follow a quite recurrent order I am able to order the project on the left pane so that the notes on “Quaderni odierni” is top to bottom listing the courses in the correct order.
Sorry for the wall of text, hope you enjoy your time with Agenda as much as I do, because is a delight of an app
@drewmccormack, I do like your thought of using it to combine notes from various projects so you can see them one one screen while you’re working on it. That’s a great idea.
And @RoboRich I can see how it would be useful in combination with other filters!
I’m not sure how I missed the other thread on how people are using “On the Agenda”… I thought I went and searched looking for more info. I like the idea of using it as a “focus mode”.
I’ll keep playing and see how it fits in! Thank you for everyone’s comments.
I just started with Agenda, but I’ve created a “dashboard template” with my weekly, daily goals, what would make my day great, routines, habits, and top three priorities, which I pin to the top of the Agenda. Then, I mark the notes I know I’ll need for the day so they also show up- but below my dashboard.
I do something similar, but use separate notes for my daily routine, and specific plan for today. That lets me collapse routine stuff separately, and at the end of the day I just delete the routine note.
@lisayoung57 how did you add the daily weather for your location (top right of image)?
I would think it’s a calendar plugin of sorts, but please elaborate as I’ve been looking for an easy way to incorporate this ever since I started using Agenda just a few months back.
I pretty much replaced everything else with Agenda, so why not my default weather app too??
Great concept, BTW, but that’s one of Agenda’s major strengths, simply being able to easily adapt. I use GMail for my primary e-Mail in case you are using it too and could share the plug-in wisdom.
I use Agenda for project management of several zoos. I have categories for:
management, admin and task forces: notes are typically linked to meetings. I don’t use reminders or tags. I hope to make more use of person tags in the future.
park construction projects: Each project has a pinned note at the top with the latest project files like designs, moodboards and budgets. Other notes are typically linked to project meetings.
crosscutting/general themes: undated notes with useful texts, links, references, …
I never use “On the Agenda” as all projects are ongoing, so they’re all important, and I can’t be bothered to manually curate them. Maybe I should find a better way in the future.
I do use Things for my todo management, and have the same areas/projects in Things, and added links in Things description to Agenda and vice versa. It’s not ideal but it gets the job done.
To be honest: linking notes to dates is not extremely useful to me. I do it so they appear on Today, but there’s not anything particular useful to it for me.
I have a calendar dedicated to recording events in the current working hours, and then I will record event-related documents in another place (such as a notebook). Agenda links these two things very well, so that I can It is convenient to find events or documents.
If there is another calendar view, you can easily see which dates are recorded, even better. like this:
One of the things I’m using Agenda for is task management and note taking/journalling for work. I have a template that I use to create a note for each work day. That note goes “On the Agenda” automatically. This is the note I will update continually throughout the day as I complete my scheduled tasks, perform adhoc tasks (things I’m asked to or otherwise need to do that are outside of my normal daily duties), take notes about various things including conversations I may have had with my manager, coaching I’ve done with my team, or anything else.
At the bottom of this template is a section I use to reflect on the day as a whole, which I use as a way to wrap up the day. After I’ve written that section, I unmark the note to take it off the agenda, collapse it, and then create new note for the next work day, which I start populating with tasks planned for the next day. Having that note On the Agenda makes it quick and easy to find regardless of what other notes I might have been working on in the app.
I’ve removed my recurring tasks because they’re specific to my role, but this is what I fill out daily. I’m still trying to adequately fill out the reflection section regularly, sometimes I just don’t have time or I feel like my general notes that I’ve taken throughout the day adequately cover it.
I will also add relevant photos and “scanned” (with my phone camera) paper documentation to the notes section. The first section is only included because of overzealous clock-watching manager who noticed when people clocked in late or out early but never when they worked through their entitled breaks. He’s thankfully gone now, but you never know when it will come in handy.
