Suggested solution for my workflow with lots of projects and actionable items?

[blockme]

How do you deal with lots of projects and actionable items within? I am willing to redefine my workflow. Whats is your best practice for the following scenario?

I have lots of different topics I have to work on. Several projects, meetings, product development, private projects and actionable items within. I do micromanagement with Todoist (I want to dump this) and knowledge management within Obsidian.

What I did:

– I document meetings within agenda and use checkboxes for actionable items. Sometimes I delegate some of them, others I have to do on my own.

– I have lots of notes in agenda. Only those I am currently working on, I set "on agenda“

– Other notes I keep for later reference and link them. Sometimes they include actionable items (checklists) as well. Their priortity is not as high, because they are „off agenda“

What happend:

– When I set my meeting protocoll „on agenda" I have to review it frequently - even if I know, that only delegated items are on the list.

– When I set my meeting protocoll „off agenda“ these checkbox items get lost.

What I expected:

– I would like to „review“ these checkbox items later, when I care about these knowledge areas.

– I would need some kind of filter, to find them again (e.g. filter for all open checkbox-items)

– I don’t want to place all these notes (containing an open checkbox) „on agenda“ because it will mess up my priority notes.

As I found out, such filters are not implemented (requested 2018 as it seems). So I assume there must be another way or a workaround. How do you (the developers) work with agenda? Is there a best practice for my described scenario?

Thanks for your help and suggestions.

[Pat_Maddox]

I use a #pending tag to indicate notes with “open loops”, and have a smart overview that searches for that tag. I use that as my main source of notes to set OTA.

Here’s something I quite like: you can create multiple smart overviews, and then command-click on them on Mac to combine them. So for example I have overviews for “3-day forecast” (any notes assigned to the next three days), #pending, #goal, and some other tags. Depending on how I’m feeling / how much I’ve got going on, I select one or more of those smart overviews to show all the notes that are in those overviews, then select the ones I want to focus on today and add them OTA.

That is a fairly loosely-structured approach that I like, because I can move notes anywhere in the category / projects hierarchy and they’ll show up in the overview. But another approach that I’ve experimented with is to create distinct categories / projects for in-progress work, and move notes or projects in and out of there. That may be another approach worth trying.

[rickdude]

@Pat_Maddox

Here’s something I quite like: you can create multiple smart overviews, and then command-click on them on Mac to combine them.

I never knew that. That’s a really neat trick.

[blockme]

Thanks for your workflow and thoughts. That’s a nice workflow and trick. This might work for me as well. I think I would be able to filter notes in the past which are still #pending. I think I will use a project tag like #work and an additional #pending tag. So hopefully I can build a flexible search by combining these tags. Not sure if this will work though - I’ll try it.

One additional question, if you don’t mind How does the “on agenda” flag fit in? Do you use it and how?

[arielylim]

The one suggested by @Pat_Maddox is great. I use agenda the same way. My tags are different though. So use which one works for you.

• For tasks, I use #open if items something I am in-charge of
• if it’s delegated or someone needs to do (like a contractor or 3rd party vendor), I use #waiting

Multiple search overviews to see them in one place. If a task is finished, or other person delivered it already, I remove the tag so it disappears from the search.

[arielylim]

Cool. Didn’t know this too. Opens up new possibilities.

[Pat_Maddox]

One additional question, if you don’t mind How does the “on agenda” flag fit in? Do you use it and how?

I do, and for me it means “something I’m going to work with in the near future”. Usually that’s some time today, sometimes it may just be for a few minutes, and I do have a few long-running notes that are always OTA (e.g. inbox, today’s plan).

Another helpful thing is the search bar at the top, which lets you filter OTA, search term, or date range. So here’s a search for #work from within my #pending smart overview:

Then I can filter it down to OTA notes:

and finally down to only OTA notes assigned to today:

The search filter persists when you select different projects or smart overviews, so you can enable the OTA filter and click different overviews or projects and only see the OTA notes there.

A common workflow for me for working with OTA looks like this:

1. cmd-1 to open the OTA overview (I have previously flagged notes OTA from one of my other overviews)
2. Identify a note to work on right now, and then click “Show Project” (which appears when you hover over the project line in an overview)
3. Now I’m seeing that note in the context of the project. If there’s too much going on, I will temporarily OTA any other notes I want to refer to right now and enable the OTA filter so I only see those notes in that project.
4. When I’m done, remove OTA from any notes I’m done with, go back to 1.

[blockme]

Great. Thank you all! This will get me started.

When looking deeper into tags I found this thread: How I use Agenda: the Eisenhower method. Combining your suggestion with “eisenhower” sounds interesting. Maybe it’s already too much.

[blockme]

Well. The linked eisenhower method is too much for my case right now. I will stick to your suggestion.

I will start with #open and #waiting for now and add sometime and important where needed. Not sure yet if I will use due(2021-10-10) or a reminder for tracking due dates.

[yargucu]

Sorry Pat, it sounds cool but I do not get it quite how to set it up.
Where can I create smart overviews? A project or categories with filters tags or dates?
Do you have a hanson description like goto menu xyz create abc? would be helpful. I got stuck. Thank you so much BR Faik

[blockme]

My current setup. Maybe it helps.

• First of all, I set a date for every note (automatically). So I am able to sort my notes.
• A note represents one bigger task in a project. Let’s say ‘rewrite some patches into something else’
• Within these notes I work with checklists. As soon all checklists are finished, my note (=task) is done.
• Some of the notes I link to assignments on my calendar, in case I need them.
• When a task has a due date, I set a ‘#due’ tag and some ‘/reminder’ for checkpoints I have to work on before this due date
• At the moment I do not set other tags like ‘pending’ because I forget about them most of the time. Ending up searching for these notes without tag anyway
• When looking for open tasks (=notes) most of the time I review them per project. All my finished notes are collapsed, so I can scroll over them. When I find something important, I set the date of the note for tomorrow or on agenda (do them now)
• All other items seem not to be that important (do them later) so they should be important, when looking for this specific topic (e.g. movies to watch)

[Pat_Maddox]

@yargucu

Where can I create smart overviews? A project or categories with filters tags or dates?
Do you have a hanson description like goto menu xyz create abc? would be helpful. I got stuck. Thank

Smart Overviews are listed just under Overviews:

Here are fully detailed instructions for how to create a Smart Overview. Quickly though, you can create one by doing “Search All”, and then clicking “Create Smart Overview” or “Create Smart Overview from Search”:

[yargucu]

Thank you so much!

[arielylim]

Update on workflows with projects and action items:

I have been using this for a couple of months and found that Agenda really isn’t a good place to keep action items. I tried adding tags for open, due, waiting, etc. But it’s just so hard. What i did is make full use of the integrations with Reminders and Calendar. I manage the individual actions in OmniFocus.

Here are some setup stuff before explaining the new workflow I use:

• Sync reminders to OmniFocus— this way, new items added in reminders goes to OF
• Create a search overview in Agenda for past 10 days notes that is On The Agenda
• New notes in Agenda gets added to OTA

Here’s how the workflow looks like:

• new meeting/brainstorm, put them in agenda.
• I created a meeting template with the basic info like attendees, etc.
• I follow simple rules for note taking. Outline format for all notes so it’s easy to refer to them later on. If it’s a clear task, I use a checklist and add it to reminders via \remind tag. I have already setup my OmniFocus to pull items from Reminders so that’s automated.
• this includes my own task and tasks of people I manage and/or rely on. The basic formula I follow is “who does what by when” — for example
  • if it’s my task, Email: John re. Q3 reports \remind(today)
  • if it’s a task im waiting on or someone else I need before i can do my work, Did Beth send the creatives for campaign ABC? \remind(tomorrow)
• I then put a strikethrough on it to indicate i moved it to my OF.
• After the meeting, I go to OF and make the necessary changes — for example, i typically remove due dates and add defer dates instead. I add appropriate tags and put them inside the appropriate projects. Sometimes, i edit the action items so it makes sense by itself because the context in the notes will be gone. I can refer back to it though since the Agenda note link is added automatically using this method.
  • in the example above, the first task i add an email and john tag. For the second one, I add a beth and waiting tag.
• Throughout the day/week, I constantly refer to OF for what I should do. I let it dictate what i should be working on. I have setup multiple perspectives to help me see the important actions and projects.
  • if i have a meeting with Beth, i go to the tag and see all the stuff i need to talk to her about and what i’m waiting for
  • if i’m in an email mode, i can pull up that tag and start sending emails one by one which includes the one from john
• In one of my routine workflow, i have a task to check/look at the Agenda search overview i shared above which includes OTA notes in the past 10 days. I then scan through this to see if i missed any tasks or create new ones based on reading through the notes. After I reviewed it, I removed it from the agenda.

The process of reviewing and updating allows me to capture tasks during the meeting. It allows me to ensure nothing is missed and, at the same time, ensure the project is moving forward.

Note that this will only take a few minutes and will get easy as you do it regularly. The first few times will be difficult since you’d probably have a lot of things to process. But once you get into the habit, it’s going to go so much faster.

When i first started this, my search overview was over 30+ notes. So that took me a a few days to read and clear. But now, my routine tasks shows up every MWF — so i only have 2-3 notes at a time to check. This probably takes up only 5 minutes or less. But for that little extra review time, i am always updated on what’s happening with my projects and tasks.

[Pat_Maddox]

@arielylim

Sync reminders to OmniFocus— this way, new items added in reminders goes to OF

This happens via iOS, right? I don’t think there’s a way for Mac to read Reminders and add them to OmniFocus, is there?

[arielylim]

Last I check, yes you are correct. But it runs automatically. I think just make sure reminders run on the background on iOS?

I noticed in most cases, when i add \remind(date) on mac agenda, it shows up immediately in my OF app. From what i can remember, there were only two occasions it went longer, maybe 20 mins. So maybe it was just a network issue. But generally speaking, after my meeting, the items i added in Agenda mac shows up in OF when i check.