In the absense of an Agenda Inbox. I’ve tried several approaches to capturing thoughts and ideas that occur over the day, none of which have worked especially smoothly for me.
However, I’ve come up with a new approach which I’m hopeful will work well.
I use Agenda as the ‘hub’ of all my work. An element of my workflow, which has stood the test of time, is a creating a new note each day called ‘The Plan for Day / Date”. (I use a template and a Shortcut automation to do this). The note is associated with today’s date and is ‘on the Agenda’. My category structrure means it appears near the top of my Agenda view. The structure of my daily note is simply:
- Morning
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[ ] - Afternoon
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In the morning I use this note to map out my day - simply listing the main areas I’m going to work on. (I review yesterday’s plan, OTA notes, emails etc to do this).
Until recently I also had a Project called Inbox, where I created a new note for ideas that I wanted to capture, without the hassle of nativating to a relevant project or note - and in fact those kinds of ideas often don’t fit neatly into my eixsting structure. The problem with this is that I would create lots of new notes that were often just a single sentence (title and content repeated!). I often forget to look at the inbox for a while!
With the new ’split at insertation point’ feature, I now make a note of any ideas at the bottom of my daily note, using headings to separate different topics.
At the end of the day, or during my review next morning, I can’t avoid noticing these items because they are in my day note, not a separate inbox I forget to review.
I can then use ‘split’ to create new notes for ideas that are worthy of a note of their own. Other ideas, I add to relevant existing notes, or add as a task for tomorrow etc.
For me, the real benefit of this approach is that it makes my Daily Plan note even more functional and avoids the distraction of switching to other projects and notes unless there’s a good reason to do so.