Planner view in Agenda?

Talk
1

Last year I ditched my paper day planner (Michael Hyatt’s Full Focus Planner which I have used for years).

The number one reason for this is that I have an essential tremor (gradually getting worse), which makes handwritten notes more and more difficult/illegible. So keyboard entry is a must.

But the second reason is the indexing system for my planner notes was pretty non-existent. I had several years of planners sitting on a shelf, and accessing the data was virtually impossible unless I remembered when an event/meeting/action occurred. Agenda’s ability to link Project Notebooks to calendar events and then search later is excellent! And I get all the notes related to particular topic organized in a notebook as well, with little to no extra effort.

This has worked very well for me. I have a dedicated iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard that sits on my desk exclusively with Agenda app always open. And those years of paper planners were tossed out in the end of year cleaning. (While I knew there was useful info going in the trash, it was too hard/frustrating to access & that it made worth very little to me.)

But 6 months into this, the three things I still miss from my daily planner view are:

  • my habit tracker — honestly just little visual cues to remind me whether or not I had completed certain habits/rituals for the day
  • An easy view of my top 3 priorities for the day. I “plan ahead” many tasks onto my calendar — I learned this many years ago from the Franklin planner system — it means I don’t have this ever growing list of tasks/reminders, and time is actually allocated for each of these tasks. But I still find it extremely helpful to be able to “plan” a bit at the start of each day. One thing that really helps is that either at the end of the previous day or the beginning of the current day, I take a few minutes and write down the top three items/priorities for that day. And I try to have those aligned with my overall goals.
  • a weekly re-cap/review at the end of the week. Usually done in the last hour on Friday. This one I have siimply care for with a meeting slot each Friday and a connected notebook with a template.

My question has anyone figured out a way to care for either of the first items in Agenda? I personally would love to be able to enable a relatively simple day planner view, that could be retrieved and populated using a simple button click on-screen. It would allow a quick glance at it at any time, and then you could click back to the normal Agenda view. I wondering if any users out there have found a way to easily manage this?

Thanks in advance!

5 Likes
2

Not sure I have an answer, but wanted to let you know that Agenda 19 is coming in the next months, and includes some great improvements to search and overviews. And Agenda 20 will build on that too.

I suspect that with the new overviews, you could probably create “views” that help with what you need, based on dates, tags, and other search criteria.

It would be worth keeping track of Agenda 19 and perhaps join the beta when it comes out and let us know if you are missing important functionality.

5 Likes
3

I use the Shortcuts app to generate a daily note, with different variations for different days. You could easliy generate a checklist to give you the habit/ritual reminders (i.e. I have one called “it’s a schoolday” that generates a checklist for all the stuff needed to get my kids out the door).

In terms of pulling in your top 3 priorities for the day, I can think of a couple of possible solutions. If you put those tasks on an Apple Calendar, you could also have Shortcuts pull those in and list them on a daily note. The other option (which may be more cumbersome, depending on your workflow) would be to create notes just for your 3 top priorities and use the ‘On the Agenda’ or the ‘Today’ filter to only show what you need to see. This way, you could even set up a template in Agenda and assign it a different color to help it stand out.

Good luck finding a solution that works!

2 Likes