Using Agenda For Writing Non-Fiction Articles

As well as having caregiving responsibilities I’m a freelance writer, and today I unexpectedly got a message from an organization interested in the health and well-being of caregivers, asking me to write them an article specifying how employers can make the workplace much more user-friendly for employees with caregiving responsibilities (it’s Carers’ Week here, and everything caregiving-related is suddenly on-trend). I’ve been there, struggled with that and have experience to draw on, but what I’ve never done is actually write about it. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, and not having an easy and effective way of organizing my material had previously tipped the balance between using what I know, and not.

I decided to accept the challenge, and set up a project in Agenda for writing articles. I wrote down in an Agenda Note everything I could think of about my experience of being a carer while also holding down a full-time job, and my ideas on how some simple adjustments in the workplace could make the situation much more tolerable for caregivers in future.

Next step was to set up another Agenda Note as a place to write the article itself. With the prep already done in the first Note, it was quite easy. I copy/pasted it into Pages to check the word count (yes, I’m looking forward to seeing that facility turn up in Agenda in due course), and it was good to go.

I was so delighted at getting the article sent in so fast it took a little while for me to recognize the spin-offs. Instead of my previous haphazard way of producing on-spec articles I now have a file for brainstorming ideas, another for research and notes, a strategy, and an action template that effectively takes care of the organizing and leaves me free to just get on and write. Hopefully this will vastly improve my productivity and the quality of my work, and maybe bring me in some better money.

To anyone who does creative work of any kind and wants a top-quality app that will both organize and inspire them, I wholeheartedly recommend Agenda. A heartfelt “Thank you!” goes to everyone who’s worked on it :heart:

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Same here, I also use Agenda for writing poetry. Thanks for sharing.

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Thanks for sharing, great use case!

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I using Agenda for writing texts as well and I think the best of Agenda is that you can have different typologies of Notes from a todo to a complete and articulated text ready for being published.
Actually, I tried to categorize the notes for Agenda, and I found so far five different types of notes:

FIVE TYPOLOGIES:

  1. Note with a single action on a date (Task Note), like “Call a person”. This typology could be considered like a “Todo”.
  2. Note to collect materials (Research Note) in order to prepare a project (could be simply a list, some spare ideas, quotations, emails, pictures, docs, etc.). To be develop more when Agenda will be improved for inline pictures and attachments.
  3. Note as a preparatory text for a project (could be a longer one and can be transformed in a PDF to be spread around and share). It can describe the components, the basic ideas and the process necessary to realize a project.
  4. Note as a report (Report Note), which is the description of an event like a meeting, a discussion, an exchange of emails or a phone call.
  5. Note as a ready text for publication once transformed in a PDF.

(Each project can contain all these typologies or just one or two)

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Hi Zoe,

I use Ulysses for writing predominantly non-fiction, academic studies and blogging.
For me the power of Agenda lies in it’s ability to export notes to precise locations within Ulysses. Share Extensions make this possible, discovering it was a real find for me.
Linking to specific notes was another killer capability, similar to Devonthink.

Norman @Pixelscribe777

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Hi, Norman! Yes, Agenda is a valuable find, & that sounds like a very helpful way of working. I’m finding it useful to export deadlines and reminders straight to TickTick, too - seems like there are as many ways of using it as there are potential users! :smile:

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