Using Agenda as a mini Database

I use Agenda as a database for all the things that I occasionally need details of and would otherwise never easily find. For example, my categories include: Insurance Policies, Household Purchases, Maintenance and Improvements, Services, Utilities etc.

Projects under each category are a particular product, item or company e.g. Double Glazing, Solar Panels, Electricity, Sky TV., Vodafone, Fridge Freezer, Software Purchased.

A pinned note in each project includes the details of date purchased, customer service phone numbers, warranty details, serial numbers etc. or whatever is appropriate (i.e. static information possibly required when contacting a company by phone, making a claim or whatever). Dated project notes contains dates and details of phone calls, servicing, breakdowns, amendments etc. to each project. This way I can easily refresh my memory on what has been done or said in the past.

Projects where I have been promised a reply or an action I put on the ā€œAgenda Overviewā€ so I donā€™t forget to chase people up if necessary.

I also have a Birthdays & Anniversaries category and a project for each month and notes under each month for each person.

Obviously, there are many other uses which I will find for Agenda but after only a weekā€™s use I have found it invaluable.

Ken B

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Some great ideas in there. Thanks Ken!

Excellent ideas, thank you!

Everything here would be so much enhanced if there is a truly usable URL scheme to interface with othe iOS apps. Fingers crossed.

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Great idea! I might try it myself!

I use similar structure for Catagory/Medical>Project/Doctors. Works like a charm with Calendar/Dates/appointment notes. I pin note with address/Ins. info/prescriptions to top of each ā€˜Project(doctor)ā€™. Been working like a charm.

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Iā€™ve added tags to to notes that contain a due date (Road Fund Licence, MOT, Insurance renewal etc.). I use saved searches to search for items falling due each month

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I adopted your idea of making a Birthdays category with months as projects, but am wondering how this can be fine tuned. I have the following questions where you may or may not (yet) have an answer for:

  1. Given Iā€™ll use this app for more than 1 year, do I have to keep changing the date to next year for each birthday? Or is there a way to make it repeatable that I havenā€™t found yet?

  2. I find it frustrating that I canā€™t order the projects (months) in the category in the way I like. It always remains alphabetical. I can drag them to other categories, but canā€™t move them inside one category (Birthdays).
    I tried using numbers to keep them ordered, but found it rather confusing/annoying to be reading 7. July where it doesnā€™t mean July 7thā€¦ so I undid that, but now the order is April, August etc.
    Any thoughts on how to fix this?

  3. Lastly, what do you put in each Note as body? Itā€™s ugly to be reading ā€œEmpty Noteā€, but I also want to keep the Birthday section of Today as compact as possibleā€¦ Maybe year of birth?

Thanks for the great insights in how to make better use of this app, I just started today and itā€™s completeness and intuitive design makes me so excited to use this app every day!

Willem

I found a partial answer to my first question above on the following thread: Repeat events

So since itā€™s not able to make a note repeatedly appear, how do you take care of this? Or do you sync it with Calendar and let that take care of this problem?

WillemH:

  1. Each note under the project of course contains a note for each personā€™s birthday (or anniversary actually, so ā€œBirthdaysā€ in my case is a misnomer) as the title, and as each one during the month is dealt with by sending a card/present, I change the due date to the following year manually. This conveniently leaves the next birthday/anniversary at the top of the list of notes - providing that the sort order is ā€œascendingā€. At the end of each month I check that all notes are due-dated the following year to ensure all events have been dealt with.

  2. As suggested by a fellow community member, I use 01 January, 02 February, 03 March etc, to maintain the sort order (itā€™s important to use a leading zero). This is a temporary measure as I believe I have read that a future enhancement will be the ability to change the project order manually (although I may be wrong about that).

  3. Yes, date of birth or age,(which I have to increment manually), address, presents given this year or suggestions for what they might have mentioned they want for next year etc. I have also started to tag each note with a due month #Birthday(January) for example so that I can set up a saved search for any paticular month (although I suppose itā€™s just as easy to click on each project month!).

Ken