Importance of Reminders with no date or time

I use undated reminders as well, and see an important distinction between them and open checklist items in Agenda. I have a lot of lists with sublists, and I don’t want to consider all of those unchecked items as “tasks” to be seen in an overview.

Example:

- [ ] Grocery shopping
    - [ ] Eggs
    - [ ] Milk

For me, “grocery shopping” is the task, and I would add a reminder for it. The link will take me to the note that includes it, and I would then check off the individual items. I would not want to see eggs and milk in an overview of incomplete tasks.

My current approach for undated reminders is to create them from within Agenda, and then in GoodTask I have a quick action to remove the date. This works for getting undated reminders out of Agenda - the only problem being that Agenda stops tracking them.

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Thanks for the additional posts. And yes, Agenda does stop tracking them, though one thing I’ve found is that if you leave the reminder indicator in agenda with grey x, but then later edit the reminder and add a date back to it, Agenda picks it up again, and you’ll see the reminder icon change back. Kind of cumbersome to work that way, but thought I’d mention it.

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I share the desire for undated reminders. For those interested, I’ve found two approaches that help me achieve a similar workflow in Agenda today:

Solution 1: The “Anytime” list

Create an “Anytime” list and move reminders on that list into the future. When I check them off in Reminders, Agenda will still check off the corresponding checklist item. They don’t show up in in the Agenda sidebar (unless I navigate to that point in the future of course), but do show up in Reminders.

I prefix actions with emoji to represent context, and set Reminders to sort by title so that actions are grouped by context. I set a date of 9/9/2099 which I find sufficiently bizarre to indicate that the reminder isn’t actually scheduled for that date :slight_smile:

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Solution 2: Will Do and Might Do

Over the years, one of the things I’ve found very important is to distinguish between what I commit to do today vs what I aspire to do today. Confusing the two has a pretty clear symptom: I end up with a todo list 30 items long, get through some of it, feel overwhelmed at the rest and avoid it for the rest of the day - something I’m sure never happens to any of you!

So I keep two lists: the Will Do and the Might Do. A common approach in task manager apps is to flag Will Do actions, and either focus on them or sort them to the top. It turns out it’s very simple to do this in Agenda:

Just prefix your reminder with *. This will sort them to the top.

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In this example, I’ve prefixed “Call Mom” and “Update schedule” with * to indicate that I Will Do them today, and move them to the top of the list. Below that are the Might Do actions, which are grouped by context because Agenda sorts all-day reminders alphabetically. Below that are my calendar events for the day.

The * indicator distinguishes the two groups of actions enough that I can mentally skip over the second group while I’m working, and only focus on them when I want to work in a certain context.

Why we want to work this way

Hopefully this next bit will help inform Drew and Alex as they refine their Reminders integration, as well as build up the Overview functionality.

I believe these three (simplified) notes illustrate the core issue that we’re discussing in this thread:

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The GTD approach says “group your tasks by context and work on them together.” The Agenda approach is “group your tasks by note and work on them together.” Task managers are good at grouping by context (even the basic Reminders.app is if you use emoji and title sort!).

If all of my tasks are one-off things, I don’t even need Reminders - I can just make a single note and organize my tasks by context (represented by the Today note).

If all of my tasks are part of a project that requires deep focus, then I can add those tasks to a single note and work directly from it. I don’t have a “deep focus” project represented here, but I could just as easily decide that I want to focus on getting indoor plants, and complete those two tasks even though they’re in different physical contexts.

Where Agenda falls short - and where I and I believe the others in this thread see the potential to get a lot of value - is in the in-between area. It’s the tasks that are spread out across multiple projects, that don’t necessarily require much focus or lead directly to the next task in the project, and might benefit from the GTD context approach. It’s when I’m sitting at my computer and think “What are some constructive actions I can take that will advance my current projects?” and then knock out as many as I can given my available time and energy.

I understand that you have planned Overview improvements. Given my experience with Agenda so far, I am intrigued to see what you come up with. Part of me is optimistic that you will come up with an approach that is more effective than anything else out there. Part of me is skeptical that your understandable resistance to creating a task manager will result in an approach that still just doesn’t quite fit.

Most importantly though…

I submit for your consideration that Reminders already provides a sufficient overview of tasks.

It provides two built-in mechanisms for doing so, and one “hack”:

  1. Search
  2. Separate lists
  3. Emoji prefix + title sort

I can find all of my calls by searching for “Call”, adding tasks to my “Calls” list, or prefixing them with :telephone_receiver:.

That’s Apple’s Reminders app out of the box. If you use it as a database and use GoodTask as a frontend, you get insanely powerful smart lists - the kind of thing that Agenda probably won’t even try to match.

In closing

  1. We want to group open tasks, possibly by context or other criteria
  2. Reminders already does that, we don’t really need Agenda to do it.

All that said, I’m looking forward to what you come up with :slight_smile:

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Thanks Pat! Very detailed and useful description.

As you know, we try not to make Agenda fit into a specific system, such as GTD, but instead give you the tools to “build” that system in the app yourself. It sounds like you have done that quite effectively in very creative ways.

One of the cornerstones of our envisaged search improvements is what I would call note summarization. That is, you will have the ability to not show full notes in the results, but just the matching paragraphs/items. Eg. many ask to be able to see “just the unchecked items” across all notes. That would be a classic example of a case where you would want note summaries, not full notes.

Your system also sounds ripe for use with note summarization. You could include GTD contexts as tags (eg #supermarket, #office, etc). Then you setup a summarized search, which will show you only the items across all notes that have that tag attached. You could search on the fly, or save the search as an overview. Seems like that would pretty much tick the GTD box, but let me know if I am missing something.

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I agree, and I’m confident I will make good use of your implementation.

I suppose the underlying question is, what should be the source database for tasks? With Agenda as the source, we’re limited to Agenda as the only frontend, and whatever functionality you build. With Reminders as the source, we can use any frontend (Agenda, GoodTask, and I think maybe 2Do?), and use all of the features they provide. As an example, here’s a view I put together in GoodTask today:

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That’s a really simple custom view that provides OmniFocus-style tag grouping (or GTD-style context grouping).

Will I be able to do something similar with Agenda overviews? Maybe, maybe not. Probably not as quickly or flexibly - I’m imagining having to create a single saved overview per tag, as opposed to this single smart group in GoodTask.

Agenda is fantastic at storing longer-term action items, and feeding them into the task manager when I want to make them more actionable (if I even need to - because lots of times I want to and can work directly from a list in Agenda). I believe the note summarization will provide an effective mechanism for just jumping right in and getting going. It’s also my experience that Reminders serves as an effective database for action items, and that if Agenda somehow supported undated reminders - at the very least by tracking their state the same way it does dated reminders - then we would be able to decide when we want to use Agenda’s built-in functionality, and when we want the power made available by using Reminders as a database.

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Interesting ideas. I’ve tried using keeping track of tasks in Agenda only, Agenda+Reminder and Agenda+Reminder+GoodTasks in various ways.

I’m currently sticking with Agenda-only. Mainly because I find it so much easier to review and plan in one app (which works because it includes my calendar).

I’d love to see some of the ideas being explored here make it into Agenda. At present I use 3 overviews, and I sometimes miss important stuff because I’m not rigorous in looking over OTA and the overviews. A solution in Agenda which allows a slicker solution would be great.

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Me too. It’s been a long time since I left task managers apps behind me and the feeling is very liberating. I am on the Agenda-only course now. (Especially with the new features coming like tables and horizontal rule!)

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One thing I’m hoping for in note summarization is for it to first filter on note-level attributes. That is, I’d essentially want a summary that says “look in all notes tagged with #active and find their incomplete tasks.” I would create a saved overview from that, and within it I would search for contexts on the fly if necessary.

Hmm, interesting point. I think our plan is to have a more powerful search working at basically the note level. That would lead to a list of notes with some search term or tag, for example. Then we would have some options for how those notes would be presented. Eg. only show unchecked items, only show lines matching search etc.

Would that be adequate? It’s basically a two phase thing: search for notes, then filter down what paragraphs are shown.

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If searching was able to take account of the ‘state’ of notes (ie OTA, NotDone/Done, Archived) that would avoid the need for tags for the state of a note - and use core Agenda features.

For me OTA means something like: I’m actively work on this today OR I’ve created this today and need to decide what to do with it.

NotDone means: active - in the queue for attention

Being able to save an overview for uncompleted tasks in OTA, and one for uncompleted tasks in NotDone, would be really powerful if the result page just showed the tasks.

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Definitely, and I think that matches what I described. I suppose one thing I’m unclear on is will “options for how those notes would be presented” be part of the smart overview? It would be cool if so, but at least for me, the more important thing is filtering the notes first.

As an example, a smart overview of “show all unchecked items” is probably not that useful for me. I currently tag my project notes with either #active or #hold depending on whether I intend to give it attention this week. I have one smart overview for each of those tags right now.

Here’s how I flag actions to work on today:

  1. Open the #active smart overview
  2. OTA the project notes I want to work on today, and enable OTA filter
  3. \remind the items that I’m going to do on today (and distinguish between Will Do and Might Do as described earlier in the thread). Typically I \remind individual actions that I will work on GTD-context style, and \remind the note itself if it’s a project that requires sustained focus.
  4. Remove the notes from OTA and get to work

With summarization, the main thing that would change is that I probably wouldn’t \remind actions that I Might Do today. So a lovely process for working on Might Do actions would look like this:

  1. Open the #active smart overview
  2. Enable “unchecked items” summarization filter
  3. Potentially enable OTA filter to focus on notes I intend to work on today, if the unchecked items list is too big.
  4. Search for :telephone_receiver: in the search box to identify the calls I could make right now that would advance my active projects, filtering only the unchecked items that have :telephone_receiver: in the line.

Personally that’s where I anticipate getting a ton of value from Agenda. I already have a good process for identifying Will Do actions with \remind. The stumbling block is the Might Do items - my options are to use one of the approaches I described in an earlier post, or to continually scan all of my OTA notes to identify possible actions right now. Continually scanning those doesn’t work for me, so I \remind a bunch of actions and then figure out how to separate Will Do from Might Do. But really, I’d love to let Agenda show me my Might Do actions and leave it at that.

It would certainly make search that much more powerful. I have asked that NotDone/Done be one of the available search filters, and I believe that’s part of the plan. FYI you can already filter OTA notes from any search, it’s the OTA button to the left of the search box:

I would personally continue to use tags in addition to these state filters. Tags represent my intent rather than my interpretation of Agenda’s intent (see below). Agenda also has a pretty unique feature to assign values to tags, which is especially useful when you use dates for those values.

Yeah and I think different people will view / use these things differently. I use them differently on different days sometimes. OTA for me usually means what I want to have my attention RIGHT NOW. It’s pretty common that I’m in a meeting and need to reference notes from multiple projects. During the meeting, I want to see only those notes. I don’t want to scan over other notes that I’m going to look at today, and I want to bring notes in and out of OTA quickly - so the shortcut and filters work perfect for that.

Tags are for organizing notes when I’m not “in the heat of battle.” It only takes a few seconds to add #now or search for it - but it’s definitely slower and a bit clumsier than OTA, which is as close to instant as it can get (I’m still hoping for a keyboard shortcut to toggle the OTA filter in searches though).

Also I have a level of attention that’s not accounted for by OTA / NotDone / Done: #active vs #hold notes. #active are the ones I intend to work on in the near future - the next week or so. #hold are the ones that I won’t be working on. #review(2020-12-18) is great for producing an overview of notes that I want to take another look at on some date in the future.

So yes, filtering on Agenda note states would be very helpful, in addition to tag filtering.

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Great explanations and very helpful, I think we are pretty much aligned in the directions we’d like to see things go.

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One thing I hope will be possible with overviews is to have all of the checklist items consolidated into a single list, and sorted by name, so I can tag them with emoji and thus have items all automatically grouped together. If they’re divided along note lines, that’s less useful.

fwiw though, this all seems to be duplicating a lot of functionality that’s already being provided by Reminders in the form of undated reminders. The main issue I have with dated reminders for everything is that if you don’t do them that day, they become overdue. Which given that many of those reminders might not actually be overdue, creates extra noise and detracts from the items that actually are overdue.

I am also not convinced by the performance argument that’s been made before (especially given that my “set a date far in the future” approach ends up with the same number of reminders as an undated list). @mekentosj do you have hundreds of undated reminders on the same list as your dated reminders? That seems unlikely to me, and could easily be solved by moving those to a list that Agenda doesn’t sync. It also doesn’t seem to fit with how we use Agenda, which is to define our tasks primarily in Agenda, and make them actionable by creating Reminders.

Here’s how I (and apparently many others) want to use Agenda+Reminders:

  1. Create lists of tasks in Agenda notes. Maybe divided by project, by day, or some other meaningful boundary.
  2. Select a subset of those tasks to work on in the near future - but NOT be due - and add them to Reminders
  3. Complete items in Reminders and have the associated Agenda item be checked off.

Agenda provides the project plan and status, and Reminders provides the near-term actionable tasks.

That’s really it, and I think it’s a mistake for Agenda to not support that workflow. But that’s just my opinion, and the last I’ll say about it.

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Thanks for explaining that usage. For what it is worth, my usage is a bit different. I tend to just work through project lists entirely in Agenda, with the notes in On-the-Agenda until they are done.

If I have something time critical, I will add a reminder to that. More like a deadline. So for me it is not about tracking projects in Reminders, it is just about getting notifications.

I know @mekentosj was thinking about no-date reminders, so who knows what may come along in future.

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I think there are three different aspects that come into play here:

Missing Features

First, I strongly believe a lot of the need for undated reminders stems from the fact that Agenda doesn’t allow you to make the type of overviews yet that you currently use Reminders for. From our end we have to look ahead and think where we’re taking Agenda, which also means that we don’t want to add functionality that later could lead to a lot confusion about how things are supposed to work when certain workflows now compete with others.

For example, we very consciously don’t allow you to assign reminders to notes (only to text) and vice versa, don’t allow you to assign events to text (only to notes). Yes, there are cases to be made about assigning events to a specific paragraph, but it would add UI, bloat the app, and most of all make the whole events-linked-to-notes concept a lot more confusing for many, especially novice, users.

Here it’s a bit the same. For us, the difference between an undated reminder and a checklist item is very very thin. The current reason for having undated reminders, as far as I can deduce from those requesting it, is mainly because the reminders app would give them an easy overview of all those checklist items that are currently important. However, there are other ways to achieve this, for example by adding a specific tag to the checklist items like “priority” and creating a smart overview for this tag. Now this is not the same because you can’t see yet a list of just that checklist item and the overviews are showing the entire note, I get that. But this will change, so once we introduce the ability to make overviews that show only unchecked items from a checklist for example, especially in combination with tags or other search parameters, we see the need to go to the reminders app diminish even further.

Presentation

As you and Drew already highlight, users have different workflows and would like to show things in different ways. For example, should undated reminders and/or overdue reminders show in the calendar in the inspector? And on all future days or just today? Is it ok for undated reminders to only appear inside notes, without the ability to get to these in the calendar etc. Sorting out these workflows and implementing these is not something that can just be added in an afternoon (especially given the technical limitations under the hood, see below). Just to say that it’s often not so much a difference of opinion but rather a matter of priority. And with that in mind, we prefer for example to prioritise the kind of note filtering and search enhancements mentioned above that have a lot more added value beyond just reminders for everyone.

Performance

You are not convinced there’s a performance argument, but as I explained in your other post life is not that simple alas. I also wouldn’t expect it to be a big issue, but alas Apple provides us with very few options and if you’d like to get the reminders that are undated you basically have to fetch all reminders a user has, and that includes the completed ones. You might not have many reminders that are not checked off yet and have a nice compact list in the Reminders app, but heavy Reminders app users might easily have hundreds of completed reminders that we would all have to fetch. Not saying it’s impossible, but it’s certainly not trivial to make this work smoothly for all.

Hope this gives more insights. As Drew says, don’t get me wrong, we very much appreciate your feedback and the detailed description of your thoughts and workflows. It might sometimes feel that we just dismiss things, but that’s certainly not the case. It really helps to shape the improvements and changes we make and to identify the workflows we might miss or could better address, so thank you for that!

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That makes sense. One reason I’ve been so enthusiastic about Apple Reminders as a database is because I can answer all of those questions (except for the one about notes) with GoodTask today. So there’s the purely pragmatic aspect of, with Reminders / GoodTask I can apply the workflow I want, it doesn’t have to be the same as what you come up with, and I don’t have to wait. There is one major shortcoming though which I’ll address later…

Just to illustrate some of the power of Reminders / GoodTask (in hopes that it helps you design your system), it’s possible to define a view which shows only one task. As someone who is easily distracted, I find that immensely helpful. I can select a set of tasks to work on, and then work through them one at a time. I do something similar within agenda by doing \remind(1m) so I have the persistent notification pop up on my phone. But I have to do that again for each task. It’s different from the approach of having a task list, and only being shown one item, and cranking through it.

That’s just an example of something that even if you decided to implement “show only one task in an overview” in Agenda, how far away is it? Because of course you have to prioritize your work.

I appreciate you sharing this, and it exposes the flawed assumption I’ve had up to this point: that Reminders is a reliable database for tasks. Based on this, and the other post, that appears to not be the case.

You might consider getting in contact with the GoodTask developer, who actively replies to questions on Twitter and frequently updates the app, as they’ve undoubtedly dealt with a lot of the same issues you’re facing. Agenda + GoodTask is already a very powerful combo, and the better that Agenda handles Reminders, the more powerful it will be.

Anyway, that is very helpful info for me to know as a user. I’ve been thinking of Reminders essentially as a database of tasks, with GoodTask and Agenda both being frontends to that database. But it sounds like it’s not particularly robust / reliable, and at the very least that informs how I make use of it going forward.

You have both been remarkably communicative, thoughtful, and considerate in your interactions with me and others here – thank you!!!

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Definitely a great breakdown. Before this comment I said to myself as I read the earlier ones that using the #tags function would be cool if there was a way to Check off a tag. When it was done. So that when we search for #reminder (o) <——- theres a button we can press to remove the tag since that particular tags function wasn’t permanent.

It wasn’t until I read your thoughts on it that I realized its the thinking someone brings to the app that maximizes its potential. Agenda has the right idea abouta dates first mentality and the ux/ui is truly promising.

So, the question is what is to be done about things that dont fall into dates yet that MIGHT become a task. I suppose if it wasn’t urgent enough to make into a committed reminder that it stays a note with the tag #followup which one can then set a reminder to spend time with #followup notes and then be able to turn them into reminders.

This is what I believe the Agenda team is trying to say from the jump.

This falls under what @mekentosj was saying, I think. We could spend time solving your particular problem, making it possible to focus a single reminder in the UI, or, we could build our more general improvements for search/filtering, which would allow constraints like “only show paragraphs matching this tag”.

The nice thing about the doing the latter, is that it doesn’t just solve one person’s particular problem, it solves many. It offers a flexibility to build your own workflow. If you want to focus one line, you just make up a tag, apply it to one paragraph, then setup a saved search for the tag which only shows the matching paragraph. So you can quite easily build your own system.

Of course, it does require those search/filter improvements, but they are very high on our list now.

Sorry to resurrect an old topic, but I think this would be a great add to Agenda. Using Reminders as a task store (or as a middleware to another task store like Things or OmniFocus) is a great function, but not all tasks have a particular due date.

I hear what you’re saying about Agenda and checklist presentation, but that assumes that all tasks are in Agenda, which wouldn’t be the case for me (particularly because of high Siri/HomePod use). Having all tasks in one place for management makes a lot of sense to me, and I’d like it to be Reminders, particularly since Reminders is so well-integrated with Agenda.

Would this be something that could be reconsidered for a possible future update?

Thanks again for the amazing continuing work!

ScottyJ

Yep, we are taking this suggestion seriously. Stay tuned!

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