What I did:
7 categories, 1-2 projects in each, but one project is quite huge with about 400 notes.
What happened:
Notes were piling up, and once in a while it would be slow to respond, so I figured that the project couldn’t handle 400 notes in a single project. I wanted to select notes of a certain kind and move all of them to a different project. Alternatively, I figured that I should archive yearly notes into another project. When I tried moving a note from the heavy project to the light project, the spinning wheel on my MacBook appeared and after a while Agenda wasn’t responding anymore. Tried moving a single note, and again the spinning wheel showed up, but the app was very slow to respond. There’s no way to organize my notes at that kind of performance.
What I expected:
An easy way to aggregate notes from a single meeting that repeats on a weekly basis (couldn’t find one), and effortless transfer of notes between projects.
Things that might be helpful to know (Agenda version, OS and model, etc):
MacBook Pro M1 Pro with 32G ram, Agenda: 18.0.1 OS: Ventura 13.4
Workflow:
While we’re here, I would also love to know the workflow for keeping projects small in the long run. I’m essentially taking meeting minutes from a couple of meetings on a weekly basis in the same project for a year. The project is more like an “Area of responsibility” so the project never finishes.
Also, the meeting topics typically span multiple projects, so it’s hard to file a single meeting’s minutes under various projects.
Indeed, Agenda can become slower if you have hundreds of notes in a project, we would urge to not have more than a hundred or so per project. Once you get to this situation a lot of processes will indeed become quite slow. The only thing to suggest at the moment is instead of drag and drop, to select multiple notes (shift/command select), then use the Move To command in the Note menu.
Once you have divided the notes over multiple projects you probably want to just keep smaller projects, for instance by limiting them to be specific to a week or month. You can also consider making larger notes if most notes currently contain very few paragraphs (if they are already large that’s not an option of course).
Finally, a trick I sometimes use and that may work well in this everlasting scenario, is to move past notes to an archive project. For example, all notes from the completed month (say August) could be moved to a new project (again, shift select, then Note > Move To > New Project) that you then name “Blabla - August 2023” and that you then immediately Archive.
Thanks for your response. Instant improvement in performance after taking the above steps. As you suggested, I went to the search window, found all notes from a specific year, and moved it to a separate project, and then archived it right after.
Another question for you, I want to further isolate some notes.
Is there an easy way to search for notes as follows:
- Search title only
- Search for phrases without matching on notes where all keywords of the phrase exist
I have tried using double quotes and that doesn’t work. Furthermore, I couldn’t find any handy tips over here - https://agenda.community/t/searching-and-filtering/55
Thanks
These search options (and much more powerful search options in general) will be the focus of the next update (Agenda 19). Stay tuned!