Hi
Agenda is continuously creeping up my usage statistics and one of the reasons may be that it is just so well designed. Important stuff is easy and yet many handy tools are only just out of sight but always at hand if needed.
Whilst I appreciate this combination of visual simplicity and depth under the hood, I still haven’t grasped the concept of dates in Agenda fully.
As far as I can see, we only have access to a single date field which defaults to date created unless I expressly assign an calendar date to it, like a date for a meeting.
However, when searching for a note it could be the date the note was created OR the date of that meeting OR a future date I have assigned this note to knowing that it will become relevant again (e.g. the next meeting) that might be the most immediate relvancy of the concept of “date”. I know that this can be done (assigning a note to a different date) but then any other meaning of date is lost or isn’t it?
And unless I am overlooking something, I better make up my mind and stick with a single usage of date or else ordering notes by date will not make much sense.
Under the hood, Agenda must have more than a single date field, e.g. when creating a date range, dates function as start and end dates.
Is the above roughly correct?
How do I integrate dates into my workflow with the current mindset implemented in Agenda? It is always best to go with the flow, I find, and not shoehorn a tool into something it was not designed for.
Would it be possible to expose different concepts of dates with senible defaults to the user without cluttering the UI too much in the future?
Perhaps I am overlooking something very obvious but I would appreciate some guidance in this regard.
Thanks
C
I think your interpretation is correct. We think of the date/date range as when the note is relevant. It is not the creation date, that is a separate thing we use internally but don’t expose much.
For example, if you are planning for a meeting next week, the date would probably be the date of the meeting.
If you have a long running project, you might use a range of dates, corresponding to when the project is ongoing.
In both cases, it is when the note is relevant. By using it this way, you can use dates in a search, and only get relevant notes, or look in Today to see what notes are relevant today.
Widgets also use these dates to decide when to push a note to the top of the list, eg, if a meeting is coming in 15 minutes, you should see that note become very relevant and be pushed to the top of the widgets.
In terms of default dates, it doesn’t choose the creation date, it chooses “Today” as the default. Admittedly they are the same, but conceptually different.
You can disable this default in the settings of Agenda so that no date is applied at all. This is actually my preference: to have dateless notes unless there is a specific date that is relevant. It very much depends on your use case. People with many meetings and date related things will probably have a date on nearly every note.
You can also create templates, and these can include a date. So, if you prefer to always create notes with tomorrow’s date, you could do that with templates.
Thanks for sharing, really helped. I am always challenged to set the date of my notes in Agenda. Just an inquiry given that the sorting is based on date, how we can sort notes in my project which have both date-assigned notes and not assigned one? Some time, the no date notes should be above the assigned one.
There are various sorting options available. To see them, tap the project title at the top of the list, and then the button top-left.
When using the default sorting, we try to keep notes without a date in a consistent order with other notes. It’s as if they have a date between the preceding and following note.
Other sort orders will likely do something different, but I can’t remember exactly what. Best to try some different orders yourself and see.