NotePlan 3’s Daily Note In Agenda

I spent months comparing Agenda with NotePlan 3. Both became the hub of my daily work, connecting Fantastical, Things 3, and Craft. In the end, I fell in love with Agenda and absolutely love working in it and the productivity increase it brings.

Having separate notes in Today linked to events or projects I’m working on is way easier to process at the end of the day, sending tasks into Things and “evergreen” material into Craft, rather than one long note for the day. But, there is still a place for a daily note that is a running log and catch-all. NotePlan does this automatically and it’s easy to navigate to a day and find the note for that day there. The Week view makes it easy to review the week and make sure all notes have been properly dealt with. It’s not so easy in Agenda to pull-up notes from other days.

I created a daily log note and saved it as a template, and then created a project to put it in after use. Each day I manually update the date for the title each day. A little to much friction for me. I came up with an easier solution. I have a Google Calendar that displays the day of the year that I show in the right panel. Now, I use that as the event (e.g. "Day 110|) the note is linked to. It’s much easier to navigate to the day in the timeline and find this event the note is connected to. If there’s an easier way that I’m not understanding, I’d love to learn how.

If Agenda can just create a better way of gathering scattered tasks—not as a task manager, but so they can be easily found and processed into one’s task manager—it will be the perfect productivity hub for me! Thank you for all the great development already!

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Thanks for sharing this Chris, great to hear you like Agenda so much!

I think this is indeed exactly the idea. Given that people use Agenda in so many different ways, we don’t like so much the idea of automatically creating notes for each day, as it might lead to notes that are simply empty. It does mean an additional step indeed. One advanced solution would be to create a script or use Siri Shortcut automation to create notes using the x-callback URLs, but the simpler (manual) one would be to indeed use the calendar in the related panel to create a new note for the current day, optionally from a template:

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It’s very easy to do in Agenda! Assign notes to days. Click the search icon, and it expands to show a calendar icon.

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Click the calendar and you can select a date range - and it has presets for e.g. This Week:

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Keep in mind there are two calendar icons in Agenda. The one in the right pane filters events, whereas the one in the search bar filters notes.

I think perhaps what you’re missing is that Agenda isn’t limited to assigning notes just to events, but it can actually assign notes to entire days. In fact, you can assign notes to an entire date range. And you can have multiple notes per day if you want (e.g. I have a daily note for home life, and a daily note for my job).

Two tips:

  1. Create notes on a given day, maybe using templates, as Alex showed.
  2. Undated notes will automatically fill in the date when you set the date. So if you create a new note, don’t set the title, and assign a date - Agenda will set the note’s title to the assigned date. If you change the date, it will update the title.

The most recent release adds a “Done” / “Not Done” filter which I think is great for this. Go to “Search All”, click the search icon, and there’s the little circle next to it. Click it, and one of the options is “Unmarked as Done”:

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Now you see a list of all the notes in Agenda that haven’t been marked done yet! For me this is the candidate list of notes to process and/or flag on the agenda. Combine that with date filtering, tags, and text-based search, and you have a nice toolkit to help you find the notes you want to work with!

A workflow idea

Here’s one way you might put these pieces together:

  1. Create a template for your daily note. Delete the default “Untitled Template” name (it should change to “Untitled Note”).
  2. In the calendar picker, click a date and choose “New note from template.”
  3. To review unprocessed tasks, go to “Search All”, select the “Unmarked as Done” option, and optionally choose a date range.
  4. When you’ve processed a note, mark it as Done and it will disappear from the search view.
  5. (Bonus) Add a #daily tag to your template, and create a Saved Overview for that tag.

For me in practice, at the end of the day, I will review the day’s notes, and if there are any things in particular that I definitely want to work on in the next day or two, I’ll migrate those tasks to a new note for that day. But sometimes there are just things that I was planning on getting to, but didn’t, but aren’t important enough to schedule right now. So I leave those in the “Unmarked as Done” notes, and then review and process them as a group - and mark as Done when I’ve finished processing them.

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You can use \date as the title in your template to automatically fill in today’s date. I have a template for daily notes for today and tomorrow.

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Thank you all for the inputs. I appreciate the community as much as I do the app! You did open my eyes to a couple capabilities that I was not aware of. I’m realizing I still don’t appreciate everything Agenda is capable of doing. The Done/Not filter is huge—what a helpful tool! Again, my gratitude to each one of you for taking the time to offer some explanation and guidance.

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Is there a way to filter only notes with „not done“ checklist items, not the complete note itself?

When searching all with „Unmarked as Done“ I see all of my notes, even the ones without checklist items, as I don’t check the title of a note as task. Is it possible to not declare a complete note (respectivly the titel) as a task/checklist item?

Not yet, it’s something we’d like to allow for in an update that will bring improvements to search.

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Thanks so much for pointing me to NotePlan 3 that is what I needed.

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Searching for this as well -is this on the roadmap yet?

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Yes, definitely on the roadmap, it’s a very popular request.

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Hi Chris

Would this help, if it was made available?

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