Recently it feels like I’ve been hearing about Agenda everywhere, and I am curious to see who here is using it, on which platform, and for what purposes. It seems like it might fit in as my work notebook, but I’d like to read some example workflows involving it! Similarly, if you’ve tried it but realised it didn’t work for you I’d like to hear why, and what you liked about it as well as disliked.
I tried it since I live in meetings and lots of short term projects. In the end I found it clunky. It needs work. I keep coming back to Apple Notes for everything these days.
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Agenda is a visually beautiful app. It does one thing Apple Notes does not do, which is connect to your calendar. However, there is an endless list of things that Apple Notes can do, which Agenda can not. Agenda is prettier, but Notes is far more powerful.
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I’ve been experimenting with Agenda on iOS and macOS and loving it so far. I use it to manage my work projects, record requirements for our dev team. For personal use it becomes the place for my journal. What is most useful for me is that I can write down details of past calendar events and make plans for upcoming events. I’m considering going premium on iOS.
I like the basic premise of Agenda. After using it for a week, I found the lack of formatting available for notes to be a problem (yep, I am the kind of person who does use tables and different coloured text etc when taking notes). I’m keeping an eye on future releases because it’s so close…just not quite there for me at the moment.
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Tried Agenda as a sort of Drafts for the Mac that syncs to iOS. I found one, small fatal flaw: Paragraphs do not have blank lines between them, making it impossible for me to compose on Agenda and cut-and-paste to plain text.
I mentioned this on the support forums and the developers said they have no intention of changing how that works because the applications that put blank lines in between paragraphs are doing it wrong. They suggested pasting to multimarkdown as a workaround.
This sounded like a hack to me and so I abandoned Agenda.
And now I’m using the DevonThink note taker as my Drafts for Mac.
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I’m currently using Agenda for work.
I’ve found that as great as OmniFocus is, its not very good at keeping track of the thoughts and decisions that goes to creating those task items.
I was originally using NotePlan for this, because they also support a bullet journaling system. However their decision for showing notes in icon/magazine view instead of as a list made me look for an alternative app.
This is where Agenda comes in.
I have a project called “Daily notes” where I create a daily note to jot down small tasks. For bigger projects I have seperate file/note for each project (that I keep an on-going log seperate by dated headers) and these are filed by department/team.
I mark on-going projects with the tag “on-going” and I have a saved search that brings up all notes with this tag and I do a review of these daily. Once completed, I remove the tag.
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I use Agenda for my work and personal project. I use it like sort of a journal for my project’s progress and learnings. I know I can just use any journaling tool for this but I found I like having a separate app for journaling for work stuff. I also have a calendar for upcoming events for those projects and add notes afterward.
Like some of the others here I have been using Agenda for work as a lightweight project manager and note taker. I paid for the premium upgrade so that I could test it out thoroughly. At the moment my notes are scattered between various apps (NVAlt, Apple Notes, Evernote) and manage projects with a combination of Todoist and the Apple Calendar app. I was hoping I could simplify my workflow.
First off, syncing between Mac and IOS is seamless. The IOS app is attractive and makes good use of swiping to open up different views and menu options. Pragmatically I find the app a bit awkward to use. There are a couple of disadvantages compared to other note taking apps:
- Connectivity. I make heavy use of services and sharing to get text into apps in Mac OS and IOS, whenever an idea pops into my head. It would be great to send a note straight into Agenda from Drafts for example.
- Images/Attachments. I also do a fair bit of research on the web and clip images and text frequently. At the moment there is no way to get images into Agenda notes.
I like the concept and I think the app has tremendous potential. There have also been a lot of favourable comments about the pricing model. But at the moment it is still lacking in essential features compared to an app like Bear. The developers are working hard to implement these features, so it would be worthwhile revisiting the app in a few months.
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This seems like the ideal app for my partner. Right now she prefers to do everything on pen and paper, but does occasionally find pain points when not having said pen and paper in front of her. This will be one I’ll encourage her to try when she upgrades her Macbook.
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I use Bear for my main note taking, but I’m a teacher, and Agenda looks like it could be an excellent lesson planning app. I’m on summer break right now, but I’m excited to give it a go when school starts back.
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I like Agenda’s UI. But I scratch my head when I try to figure out how best to use it. The developers seem to discourage its use for task tracking, and Agenda is really not good for that. A note can be linked to a single calendar event, but it’s not possible to create a note that refers to multiple events without hand-hacking links to BusyCal or Calendar events. There are no share extensions on Mac or iOS to get into into Agenda — while Things and OF have a great ability to accept data from other apps.
So I must be missing some sense of the best workflow or productive use of Agenda, or expecting too much, but I’m close to demoting Agenda from my Dock and moving on.
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Yes, Agenda falls into the category of delightful, beautiful apps that I wish I had a use for but do not.
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I have started to use Agenda to keep a record of my work as a translator, consultant and other activities. I handle task management with OmniFocus but it’s not suited for leaving a record of how something was accomplished or tracking time (number of pomodoros). Also, it’s a good scratchpad for planning projects. I use it on my Macs, iPad and iPhone. Still early days so ask me again in a few months about if or how I’m using it. I tried to something similar with Bear but it didn’t stick.
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I happen to love Apple Notes. I rely on it daily and Apple, as I’m sure you well know, has continually put a lot of effort into development. I have several nice note apps for iOS and I was eager to try Agenda. However I was immediately put off by the subscription price! (I have a hard time with them in general). At any rate, what Apple Notes doesn’t do, I’ll use my other notes apps to supplement. Meanwhile, I’ll keep an eye out for other notes apps that charge a reasonable flat rate!
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Yeah, it’s tough to wrap our head around a new business model. But many things have become a subscription nowadays. I have a cellphone bill, TV bill, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, power, water, gas, etc.
The question is now different. Do I use the app enough to make up for the price of the subscription? I don’t make enough money to justify an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. I’m happy with Affinity Photos and Pixelmator. But I make enough money to need a Ulysses subscription.
Now, we have to see if Agenda is an app that will help me make money.
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I am leaving Agenda. Like many others have said it is missing a few things other apps have. Additionally it is currently not syncing properly. I don’t have the time to investigate why. Most importantly it doesn’t allow me to easily associate a note with more than one item. I could tag and search but that means finding the note and adding tags usually at a later time or date. I’m looking for the ability to associate a note with a task in a project and find it with the task or the project. Not something I’ve found yet. Sorry Agenda I’ll be deleting you from my Macbook and iOS devices.
Agenda fits a perfect need for me. I take a lot of meeting minutes, for work and for the many volunteer groups that I belong to. Meeting minutes are always date-based. Having a central location where ALL my meeting minutes are stored is perfect for me. I can search by date from my calendar. I can scroll through minutes for any one project. I can search in Agenda.
I’m already writing minutes using Markdown (I use iThoughts to take minutes, and Marked 2 to convert them to Markdown) so it’s easy to save formatted minutes. I love it.
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I recently went through the job search, interview, hiring and relocation (from western RU to NZ) and used agenda for all of this.
Pros
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Linking nots to calendar events:
This was both useful for preparing for calls, i could pre-fill each such not with the needed Questions i was going to have with my prospective employers/immigration lawyer. But is was also very usefull when it cam to referring back to the nots i had made since (for me) indexing by calendar event was a realy simple way to do a lookup.
an example would be i might be somewere and wander if I asked about bonus pay, and i could then go back and check my notes for a given companies interview and see if i made any note of it. -
nesting of notes is powerfull
cons
- their implementation of a live markdown text entry is a little broken sometimes (i know this is a hard thing to do as i have worked on an app the attempted it as well), it can sometimes be a bit buggy and that is realy anoying.
- one cant embed files directly within the not, it just puts a link to the file.
- No easy way to share notes with other people, all our relocation notes and checklists ended up being copied out into an app my wife wrote just for this task so we could keep our heads above water with the visa deadlines.
overall i would say if you are doing losts of calls with lots of people and need to check back on those calls and possibly prepare some simple notes in advance it is a perfect tool. I would not use it to plan a book/paper through.
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I use DEVONthink extensively. Is Devonthink note taker a separate DT auxiliary app for the Mac?