Show Outline of current Note in sidebar

I’ve just come off a long call with someone where I’ve been refering to long note in Agenda.

The note was supposed to be a sort of agenda (sic!), but the conversation ended up tackling things in a different order, and I needed to jump back and forwards between sections.

At times I was at risk of not finding the relevant part of the note as we talked.

It would be brilliant if a new section in the right hand side bar showed the outline (based on headings) of the current note. The outline needs to be clickable so I can jump to the part of the note I want right now!

I would almost suggest such a long note could probably be split, and then you could use the jump bar at the top (click project) to get to the relevant sections.

We already have a lot of navigational help, from jump bar, to history buttons, to related info panel, but it is all about navigating notes. If you can structure your info into bite sized notes, it helps a lot. Adding that same navigation within a note would be difficult.

Note also you can add headings inside a note, to make it easier to find what you are looking for. I do that a lot.

I could have chopped the note into smaller notes, but the only reason to do
so would have been for navigation! Additional, unnecessary work when the
material actually made more sense as one note. Also I could have only
linked one of these notes to the calendar item for that phone call.

I was using headings inside the note, and yes they did make it easier, but
an outline based on those headings would have been easier still.

IIRC elsewhere on the forum one of the team advocates using longer notes,
rather than breaking things down too much. If that’s correct, I think you
maybe need to discuss this and clarify what length of notes Agenda is
really designed for.

I can really see the benefit of shorter notes in some circumstances, but a
without some means of connecting notes sequentially that won’t work for a
longer document with a narrative structure or other logical flow. For
example drafting a proposal with separate notes for Intro, Background,
Method, Costs etc will be messy if the notes are mixed up with notes of a
calls with the prospect, team brainstorms etc - all of which need to be in
the same Project.

Don’t think there is one answer to how long a note should be. Different people use different lengths, and one person can have a mix.

Personally, once a note starts to get longer than what I can see without scrolling, I find it better to create a new note and continue there. You can certainly go longer than that, and many do, but for me that is about the maximum.

I don’t think it is realistic to write a novel in Agenda in a single note. Were you to undertake something like that, you would probably split chapters into notes, or even have a separate project for each chapter, to keep it all maintainable. As notes get larger, you lose a lot of the other advantages of the app, such as applying dates, collapsing, searching, linking etc.

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