Hey all! I need some advice for a daily note-taking app that can also be used for weekly planning. I’d like it to have backlinks, so I can take meeting notes in it as well.
Here’s what I’m doing now: every week, I create a doc similar to this template in a Notion database. The entire week’s planning is in one place, which I find handy for the way I work. If I have meeting notes, I put those in a different Notion database and link to them from my weekly planner, so I can see what happened historically from week to week. Finally, I have a third database in Notion that just lists all of my projects and their associated notes from the notes database.
I find Notion’s database structure simultaneously amazing and clunky, and I’m in the market for a better solution to this problem.
Two apps immediately stand out to me: Agenda and Craft. Craft is very nice, but it’s focused on daily logs rather than weekly logs. Agenda seems to do this one thing and do it well, but there’s not a great place in the app to create an overview page for each project or client I work with. This is something both Craft and Notion do well. (And Agenda doesn’t backlink easily.)
Craft is beautiful and gels with how I think about all this stuff for the most part, but the lack of a weekly log feels like a deal breaker. Am I overthinking this? For those of you who plan week by week, how have you solved this problem?
# {{date:YYYY-\Www}}
%% [[Weekly Review Checklist]] %%
## Review of last week
### Achievement: what was the most significant win last week?
### Habit failure(s)
### Habit success(es)
### Biggest lesson(s) learned last week?
## Preview of this week
### What’s the ultimate goal? Revisit it and rewrite it!
### Overview
%% [[⧉ Projects]] %%
%% [[☰ Projects]] %%
#### What's on your mind?
#### What's on the agenda for this week, in order?
### Vision
#### What lead measures are you tracking right now?
#### Progress goals: what must be done by the end of this week? Why?
#### Ten problems:
> Richard Feynman's "keep problems in your mind and apply the things you encounter to them regularly in order to solve them" trick.
## This week:
![[{{monday:YYYYMMDD#dddd MMMM D YYYY}}]]
![[{{tuesday:YYYYMMDD#dddd MMMM D YYYY}}]]
![[{{wednesday:YYYYMMDD#dddd MMMM D YYYY}}]]
![[{{thursday:YYYYMMDD#dddd MMMM D YYYY}}]]
![[{{friday:YYYYMMDD#dddd MMMM D YYYY}}]]
![[{{saturday:YYYYMMDD#dddd MMMM D YYYY}}]]
![[{{sunday:YYYYMMDD#dddd MMMM D YYYY}}]]
…turns into a weekly note with embedded daily notes, plus the details I write in at the top. Percent-wrapped bits are commented-out text hidden when the note is rendered for read-only viewing.
*I don’t often do weekly notes, mostly for lack of discipline…
Take a look at NotePlan. I’ve used the app since version 1.0 and, even though I stray away, I always find myself going back. NotePlan has all the features you asked about. What’s more, the app is actively developed and the developer is responsive to user feedback.
The community has a r/noteplanapp subreddit and http://noteplan.co if you want to learn more.
The only gotcha is a pretty steep $60 annual subscription. I pay because I like the developer and I use his app everyday.
Noteplan is available from Setapp, if you have that service. There’s a gotcha however – if you want to use Noteplan on iOS and macOS you’ll run into Setapp’s expensive fee for an iOS device subscription – $30/year.
You’re close! The second is a kanban board (though I probably should use vertical lines, eh?) and the first is a kind of inbox that uses a set of embedded searches to pick up on certain note names and tags.
