I manage development at an agency where I might go months between thinking about a client, and effective work just doesn’t happen without people understanding the context of it. Agenda has helped me quite a bit after I ramped up on it in 2018. I think it can be a good choice!
I almost never use On the Agenda (new notes default to today’s date with OtA off.) Most notes are created by dragging a calendar event from the right to the appropriate project on the left to make a new note with the meeting details pre-filled. I have about 60 projects on the left in 6 folders (clients/subprojects, internal, vendors, people, etc) and I’m slowly starting to expand into sub-projects on some major clients and internal work.
Notes aren’t copious but I am constantly editing and shaping linear bullets into non-linear topics/objectives while listening and talking (I’m a fast typist, don’t look at the keyboard and notes help me pay attention to people.) My goal is to have the conversation shaped into an organized artifact that I can turn around to my team, new issues, a SoW, etc. This is not something I could do with hand notes or iPad + Pencil.
If we’re creating a SoW live during the meeting, I’ll just work on the shared doc and just link to it on Agenda. My goal is to be done with the notes right after the end of the meeting, which is why I don’t go through and review them later using On the Agenda. I’ll often look up a note a few days or weeks later, but when I do that I just search or go to the project to get it.
I also use it to take notes on future meetings. Eg we do some different quarterly reviews. I’ll create a note in advance (linked to a calendar event if it’s available, otherwise best guess date or pinned to the top of the project) and add items as I think of them. Same for some 1:1s although I hope to move this to shared Google Docs soon so both sides can participate. For annual planning meetings this is especially helpful.
I’ll use the task formatting for NAs but I don’t try to manage tasks in Agenda. It’s too simple. Usually I’ll just turn actions into items in our work tracker. I use OF quick entry for ad hoc to-dos or followups.
Our work trackers are some Kanban-style tools that save a ton of time and some big shared docs with longer-term planning/architecture/specs. A lot of your management work should be public/shared information artifacts somewhere like that because you organize and communicate at the same time!
Hopefully some of this is helpful.