Wow, that’s some elaborate and detailed feedback, thank you so much! To start with the tl;dr:, part of philosophy of creating Agenda instead as opposed to using task managers is that we want to preserve the history of what you’ve done, creating the breadcrumbs of your past – see also the intro movie. So in general the answer is to try to as much as possible to create new notes for new meetings instead of deleting the content of a note and changing it. This in many ways is what discriminates Agenda from say the Apple Notes app or many taskmanagers.
Having said all that, we do see a lot of space to improve the workflows for repetitive meetings, either by making it easier to reuse lists and have better overviews of checked vs unchecked items (see The features we are working on right now…), but also through templates for example. For the latter we have ideas to built templating features in at some point, but in the mean time, this talk article is a good start, especially because it also describes similar workflows as yours:
I guess what’s most interesting is that what you describe was essentially exactly my role and my needs when I was leading the Papers team within SpringerNature for three years, and was what led to the idea of Agenda
I still plan to write some more about that, but in general what I found worked well for me is that on the one hand I had Agenda Projects around the real projects (i.e. Agenda app, Findings app etc) where I would collect ideas, kept a note on the next release etc. Those would go in the Apps category.
But I would also have Agenda Projects for meetings with people. Basically, I would have one for:
- our weekly management team meeting
- one for each of the management team members I would quite regular have one-on-one’s with
- one for my boss which I would regularly have one-on-one’s with
- a few others that were more for meetings with people grouped by area/topic
The reason to split it up like this is that this way after a while it nicely gives a focused timeline for those meetings you have quite regularly like a team meeting, 1:1, but also daily standups for example. What did we discuss last time? And the week before? And a month ago? Instantly accessible and a great overview/resource. I would also keep at the top always a note for the “next time”, which I used to collect the “agenda” for the next meeting.
But to prevent some kind of “dead by a million projects” I kept those limited to a few and instead would put all other meetings at work in a more general project like “Collaborations”. Which still leads to a nice overview of meet ups and discussions over time for that topic, albeit a bit more diverse.
Together this worked brilliantly for me, led to developing Agenda and I still use this approach today.
As with everything, given Agenda allows for many different ways to organise things it often just takes a bit of experimenting and also some time to make it really work well. You’ll find that it will get better and better as you start building things out.