For longer than I would like to admit, my biggest productivity pet peeve has lived in the gap between Agenda (my note taking app for meetings) and OmniFocus.
I’d leave a meeting with a stack of action items typed into Agenda along with my notes, meaning to process them into OmniFocus later. But back to back meetings usually get in the way. Maybe half actually made it across. The rest were lost in an abyss of inaction, buried in a note I’d reopen three weeks later with that sinking feeling. And when (if) I did sit down to process, it took forever.
Then I set my Robot Assistant loose on the problem. It runs on its own with scheduled tasks. I designed a trigger based system built into my note structure that allowed me to:
- Turn my raw notes into a clean Minutes of the Meeting in my preferred format (when triggered “MoM: Y” in the header of the Agenda note).
- Push action items into OmniFocus, properly tagged, projected, and dated, according to a predefined logic.
No reformatting. No copy-paste cleanup. No guilt.
The real unlock isn’t speed. It’s being able to take notes in an efficient format during the meeting, without paying a tax for it afterwards. My notes stay mine. Polished output goes to the people who need polished. Tasks land in OmniFocus.
A quick note on plumbing for anyone curious: Agenda ships with an MCP server you can enable directly from inside the app. For OmniFocus, I’m using a community MCP from GitHub, built by a reputable developer. Both are working reliably for me, with some fine tuning.
Happy to share the setup if anyone wants the details.
