Guys! I’m blown away with all you have packed into v14! Especially back-linking. And the inclusion of autocomplete for so many options is amazing. Thank you so much for all your efforts making a great app somehow even better.
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Great to hear @daveb08 & @maurizio.bortolotti, glad you like it!
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The [[ links are really well done and super useful. My main use case is in preparing daily notes. I quick link to the project notes I intend to work on that day, and can easily navigate to them and grab the first couple things off the list.
I particularly like the related notes, so I can see what days I’ve worked on a project note. One thing I’m curious about: will Agenda show me every note that links to the current note? That would be ideal for me, rather than it only showing the top N related notes. It’s so new that I haven’t had a chance to see what the limits might be 
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Yes, it should show all, that is, of you scroll the list down to reveal more than the 3 shown by default.
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What an indeed amazing discussion here. @olaf.wolkenhauer and all, great to read your contributions.
I feel we all want to store knowledge without too much structure and as a second brain be informed about links between information.
Almost no note taking app is so clean, simple and intuitive as Agenda. This is what made it stand out for me in the first place.
Being able to tag notes more granular on sentence or paragraph level and see this text in one overview (all open tasks, all closed tasks, all ideas, all objectives, all notes tagged with person X, all sentences tagged with #idea), is for me the killer feature. One app Sapium shows that it can be done.
I am very interested if others would like to have granular tagging and tag overviews (showing all tagged text together with backlinks to the original note) too. With this you can then also have an open-task overview separate from all notes. If these tasks can include a deadline and can ticked completed in the overview then Agenda is ‘the ring which rules them all’.
Best regards
Johan
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Great discussion. We have access to cool tools that I wished existed many years ago.
I use Agenda for forward looking time based notes linked to my calendar. My use case is almost exclusively for actual ‘agendas’ or talking points for scheduled calls or meet ups. Agenda is one of my favourite apps.
I use Obsidian to drive my PKM using a hybrid combo of PARA and Zettlekasten. I really like Obsidian, but it is such a blank sheet of paper that it is not for the feint in heart to set up. The non standard UI is something I hope they improve as time goes on, but it is a great canvass to ‘create’ your own system on. The mobile apps are great, but make sure you use a theme that works well on all platforms.
I use and have had for many years Devonthink. This is my file vault. You can write in Devonthink and on occasion I use Typora to do this, but most of my writing is on Obsidian and a bit on Agenda as Devonthink is my big file cabinet of resources.
To integrate all of this I index the Obsidian vault with Devonthink so I can search both at the same time. I use links across all of my apps with Hook. I need to experiment so see if I can index Agenda somehow with Devonthink as there may be possibilities there.
I use very few folders these days, relying on tags, links, file name conventions and searches. I gave up on folders because stuff got lost and buried anyhow, so I made a move more and more to search. When spotlight or one of the search functions in an app fails to locate something, I will boot up Houdaspot to do some deep dive searching.
I sometimes create ‘soft’ or conceptual task lists in Agenda or my other apps, but my main daily driver of task management is GoodTask which enhances Apple reminders and is based on David Allan’s GTD philosophy. The deep integration of reminders in the Apple system along with Siri and locationally based reminders is awesome.
Using the philosophy of ‘Don’t Check Your Email First Thing In The Morning’ I clear my inboxes three times a day, answering anything I can on the spot, converting everything else to tasks for later processing in my Good Task inbox. Email is a huge time waster and distraction if one is not careful.
With this deep integration, I use BusyCal and BusyContacts. Links are put in these spaces to my agendas in Agenda, and work spaces in Obsidian and resources in Devonthink.
Everything is accessible on my MBP, iPad and iPhone through the cloud. Media and resources are clipped and sent to my Devonthink inbox as I see something I want to capture for later processing. Ideas are put in my Obsidian inbox for the same. Thoughts about future meetings and items I want to bring up during a time based event are put into Agenda. Last tasks go into the inbox of Good Task for later processing. I do daily, weekly, monthly and annual reviews clearing my inboxes, throwing away the clutter and focusing on my main roles in life using Stephen Covey’s thinking on time management. I am also a big fan of Harnish’s Rockefeller Habits.
Of course this is always evolving based on new features that are being introduced all the time by each of the software developers.
Going back to Agenda, it just works for me. I used to use the notefield in Outlook for the talking points or agendas tied to a scheduled item, but Agenda provides that and so much more. My goal with each of these systems and workflows is to capture thoughts, ideas and tasks, capturing them as they come along for later processing so that I can be present in the moment, saving my cognitive capacity for creativity and relationships, rather than getting bogged down with trying to remember everything.
We have cool tools!
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That is definitely on the roadmap, and I believe it is two major releases away. I don’t think they’ve officially announced it, but based on multiple comments I think the next major release is sharing / collaboration, and the major release after that is an upgrade in overview / filtering.
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In relation to granularity of units that one can refer or link to, tag etc I found this article about “block based” software interesting:
https://maggieappleton.com/block-data
The idea to type /… and have things at your fingertips, is very powerful for searching and connecting things.
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My 1st trip back to the Forum in quite a while. And the first post I see to a thread I’ve been watching is yours. To which I can quickly reply…DITTO! I’ve been ‘away’ looking at Obsidian. Great app, but as you say not for the faint of heart. Strangely, it’s a two person Dev team that, like Agenda, that has done some amazing work. (DevonThink ain’t bad either). I’ve been on a journey that has taken me to many ports (apps really) in hopes of solving my Second Brain, Zettelkasten quest. I think now, my quest is over. No more wandering. I’m NOW focusing on the strengths of both Agenda and Obsidian, and what they offer me together.
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And while I’m here posting, thanks Olaf for the article. Right on topic for me.
Hello olaf.wolkenhauer!
Thank you for sharing such a detailed overview of the various note taking methodologies and tools available.
I’d like to mention a couple of things. For those that like mindmaps, but don’t want to pay a monthly subscription for Mindnode, check out SimpleMind Pro. This app is just $10 and has a lot of mind mapping features: You can also collapse nodes and lists, design many different types of maps, and export mindmaps in several different formats.
Noteplan also supports backlinking and thus the Zettelkasten approach. Because Noteplan stores all notes as markdown files on the computer, some users use Noteplan together with Obsidian. Apart from the graph view, I am not sure what the motivation is behind this combination.
Noteplan is also $59.99 a year for personal use and $99.99 a year for business use. I have no idea why someone, even if they have plenty of money, is willing to “rent” an app when there are dozens upon dozens of alternatives that are either a one-time fee or entirely free.
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For mindmapping, there is also XMind, in case this was not mentioned before. There is thus plenty of things to choose from
I have no expectation that a free app serves me well. In fact, I want to pay for an app that I use everyday. For example, DevonThink has no subscription, its a one off payment but I would be very happy to pay an annual amount (subscription, fee whatever) because it is a tool that I use every day, is very reliable and really well supported by the developers.
If I use something every day, I probably use it for work or important things, so that if there are problems, I need help and hope for the developers to be there. I therefore keep an eye on the forums and the engagement of the developers. It gives me an impression of whether I can trust the software and whether I like to support its development.
In my experience, at least for the most important and most frequently used apps, they are worth the money I spent on them. I admit that the many subscriptions add up to a sum that not everyone can afford. I also pay for iCloud and Dropbox storage, various productivity tools and not to think of the costs for Internet and for Netflix & Co …
I like the ideas behind Agenda and the integration of the community and support into the app.
Olaf
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Agreed. Agenda has the best pricing model I have encountered. The community is great, too! Thanks again, Olaf, for the insightful discussion here.
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Technically, tags are, in fact, at the paragraph level in the data model already. The catch is that searching for tags returns entire notes.
So the good news is that under the hood, this atomical tagging is there, the work is in making search work to surface the content accordingly from a UX perspective.
Just sharing for fun based on my convos with the team.
ScottyJ
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I have commented before this discussion indeed lists the core issue with all note taking app’s. From a user-interface point of view, I like Agenda the most. It is very intuitive, not cluttered, non-technical and not over-featured like Notion or Obsidian. Also the link to time/date and agenda is just perfect.
There are 2 main objectives, which despite my passion for Agenda, made me move away from Agenda to Noteplan (nice to have sponsored Agenda with buying the premium version 
:
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Having a centralised task overview linked to the agenda (this works in Noteplan), showing just the tasks hidden in notes in one overview and link to the original note.
Why: in meetings I’d like to mix information and actions and tag people for followup. This is missing in Agenda and is available in Noteplan. But Noteplan is lacking the structured interface of Agenda. -
Having a summery page per tagged text (sentence or paragraph)
Why: in notes with long book-summaries or meeting-notes, I’d like to select paragraphs or sentences and tag it (like #idea, #customer-name #skill etc). The selected text which is linked to the tag, must be displayed on the ‘tag-page’ where only Sapium did implement this well. This feature is missing in both Agenda and Noteplan and can also be used for the centralised task overview. At the end, you don’t want 1000 notes but 10x resulting overviews of ideas, actions, knowledge items etc grouped together in a summery-note.
So … after testing Noteplan+, Evernote, Notion, Roam, SuperNotes, Bear, Sapium, Mem.ai, AmpleNote, Upnote, SiYuan, Affine and Agenda, they all are missing these key features. I decided to stop moving/testing and stay with Noteplan (very expensive) for now, until one of these app’s will fix it. In many Note-App forums, these 2 key features are discussed in multiple ways, without makers picking it up.
I hope Agenda will be the one, to end my 10 year search 
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It would be amazing if you could extract a conversation like this and insert it into an Agenda note.
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Interesting idea. The community software is not made by us. I’m not sure if it has export facilities. We’ll take it along. Thanks!
You might want to look at this post: How to print or export very long topics - support - Discourse Meta