I have a problem on how to consider the date. I’m referring to the date you can select using the top right button in the note. How should I consider that date? As a due date or as the date of the note, the date of creation, how? This will significantly change my workflow and the philosophy behind the app because I need to have dates associated to a note, but not as a due date, for tasks I like to use Things.
Hope my question is clear enough. Thanks in advance!
How should I consider that date? As a due date or as the date of the note, the date of creation, how?
To a certain extend you are free to choose the system that best works for you. However, the general idea is that it’s the date the notes pertain to. For example the date of the meeting you are writing down the agenda or minutes for. Or the date on which the event you’re planning for is taking place. This is also why often a calendar event is a natural fit and you can instead of pointing to a certain day or day range, choose a specific calendar event instead.
As said however, there’s nothing preventing you from deciding that you’d like to interpret the date as a due date (for instance by having each note in a project represent a stage in the preparation or execution of a project or leading up to an event), or as the creation date of a note (for instance in the case you treat a project as a “journal”).
Like you I use Things for “due dates” of …Well…“things”…those notes in Agenda that I want to set a due date for - I copy the link, and place that link in the notes for a to do in Things and use my usual workflow to assign it etc.
I use TypeIt4Me (a better replacement for TextExpander I think) and have a date time stamp that I use as the first part of the title for every note - that way, throughout the day, throughout various projects I just “stamp” away and have a running timeline.
Finally, I use Fantastical2, and Tyme - which allows me to effectively “link” Agenda notes to particular days, blocks of time, and projects by simply linking notes not only to a date, but also to a block of time. It is this last bit that I think might come closest to answering your question.
Hi, Recently I was thinking of the same thing and a solution to this. I’m an avid user of Devonthink to organize my files, links, images, notes, etc. When organizing you often have material that doesn’t easily fit in a single group. Their solution is a brilliant one, you create replicants which become (unlike in Bladerunner) an instance of exactly the same file. Once you add a replicant, you are just adding another pointer to the same file so all replicants are equivalent. What does this have to do with dates in Agenda? I believe a similar approach would work for dates. If you leave a date for the day of creation or even change it then nothing about the operation of Agenda changes from the current version. But if you also wanted that note to come up on a future meeting, you simply add another date. The dates then become an array of dates, not necessarily prioritized from one another, with agenda items coming back into being every day you need them to. As in Devonthink, the date would simply change color if there were replicant(s). When you then click on the date you can choose to edit that list (perhaps through some simple mechanism of option keys to add or delete). I like elegance, and I think this would be a very useful and elegant solution.
I also struggled with the concept of dates in Agenda. I understand now, but I think there is some value in trying to articulate where the confusion stemmed from.
Because Agenda is so flexible, the way you choose to use the app actually changes the meaning of the wording/terminology.
There are two independent forms of date management in Agenda:
The issue is with the meaning of the word ‘due’ - for those of us who use Agenda as a task scheduling tool (a todo list of sorts) then the term “Due Date” naturally refers to the date that the task is supposed to be performed on.
But for those who use Agenda as a work journal the term “Due Date” changes to mean the ‘deadline’ for when you must finish working on that note, which is quite a different concept.
Getting Agenda to surface the notes for your attention in a timely manner is integral - if today is the “due date” of my todo item, it’s the perfect time to see it. But if today is the “deadline” of my essay I’m writing, seeing it now is far too late.
For the people in the ‘todo list’ camp it doesn’t make sense to have two methods of assiging a due date - and the ‘assign a calendar date’ is the faster and more elegant way of selecting and tracking your todo dates.
For the people in the ‘work journal’ camp it makes perfect sense to have one date for when your work needs to be complete (the ‘deadline’) and one date for when the work relates to (‘next week’s meeting with Tom’)
The problem is compounded by the fact that if you set a Due Date of today by attaching a tag named #due(Today), then that note will not appear in the ‘Today’ section, which I found rather confusing.
There isn’t actually anything that needs to be fixed here - thanks to the ability to save your own Overviews which can be filtered by either Due Tags or Assigned Dates.
Ultimately there is flexibilty to use Agenda how you want to, but I thought it might be useful to attempt to explain why it’s confusing for people.
Sorry if this was long-winded 