I’ve taken a closer look at this, and I can see it being really useful for those of us - like me - struggling to use Agenda to keep on top of ‘Tasks’. I’ve tried various ways of doing this, both purely within Agenda and also using Agenda and Reminders.
But in Agenda, you can’t search on unchecked tasks, nor on uncompleted projects. And then using Reminders always seems to degenerate into a long list of tasks being thrown at me as their due date hits.
I’ve watched a couple of Carl Pullien’s videos and there are some nuggets I find really helpful. He argues (I’m paraphrasing wildly):
- "The place to manage your projects is in your notes application, not in a Task Manager. In a notes application you can provide context, have your meeting notes in the projoect etc.” This makes real sense, it’s what Agenda does supremely well, with the added benefit of being date-focused.
- “You don’t need to track every task. Most often, you know what you need to do to advance a particular project - you don’t need all those tasks in your task manager. You just need to record “work on Project X"
- “Managing some kind of project structure for your Tasks, in a Task Manager, is too many decisions and wastes too much time.” Yup, and you have issues about should it be the same structure as in Agenda etc.
- “The simple solution is to create the following folders in your task manager:
— Inbox
— this week
— next week
— this month
— someday / maybe
— recurring tasks” - “Any tasks that come in over the day, put in the inbox”
- “Each day, review the inbox, and move to the relevant folder, depending on urgency and importance”
- “Each day, review “this week” folder, and decide when you are going to work on these tasks. Allocate a date to the task so it shows up in your calendar for the day and week”
- “Now your calendar shows you the tasks for today and the rest of the week”
My original thought about applying this to Agenda was change the date associated with a Note so it would show up in the ’this week’ ‘next week’ etc filters. But on playing with it, it seemed complicated and messy - especially if I don’t complete the Note by the due date.
Now I’m thinking that the way to go it to use Reminders. At an overview level, I can add a reminder with an Agenda link to the relevant folder in Reminders, so I don’t lose sight of projects and ideas.
At an ‘in the moment’ level, eg taking a meeting minute, or working on a Note, and realising I need to be sure to come back to a task, I can use the /remind tag to create a Reminder, and just dump it in the Reminders Inbox to process later or in the relevant ’Next…’ folder if I have decided already.
One small fly in the ointment - there is no way to add an undated reminder from within Agenda. So this means, when I’m in the Reminders Inbox and processing Tasks, I have to uncheck the date on the Reminder. Because, remember, this system works by manually adding the date to a Task when I decide I want to work on it!
This video describes the set up in Apple Reminders.