I'm still thinking about what's the best way to use Agenda. I'm not going to talk about its features, MacStories has a great overview of that. At first, it looks like another notetaking app, but having the ability to assign dates to notes is making me consider to use Agenda instead of Day One for journaling.

The main pitfall for me with Day One is still its own sync backend. They switched over to it more than a year ago now, but I'm still not comfortable using that for personal journals and photos. I've used iCloud sync with Day One which always worked fine for me. iCloud servers are maintained by Apple whom I trust more from a privacy point of view than a small 3rd-party developer. Agenda uses iCloud for syncing which is a big win for me.

My other problem with Day One is that it feels like an app that made for writing a personal diary instead of a journal (yes, there's a difference). I'm not really into writing diaries, although I have 1100 entries in Day One at the moment. Agenda, on the other hand, feels like a digital version of bullet journaling. There is no separate view for each note, everything is in a scrollable timeline. Notes can be edited inline which makes the whole journaling process quick. I really enjoy this aspect of the app.

Agenda still misses its iOS counterpart and the ability to add attachments to a note—each of these features are coming according to the developers—but I've started using it for the following:

  • I'm developing my first iOS app and I've started documenting the whole process in Agenda. At the end of each day, I go through my git commits and make one or two notes about changes and ideas I have for the app down the road. I'm also collecting a list of things to talk about with the client. This is where Agenda's ability to attach notes to calendar events comes in handy for meeting preparations.
  • My commonplace book was also migrated from Day One to Agenda. When I'm marking a paragraph in a note with the #reference hashtag, it's gets added to my "Commonplace Book" saved search. It's nice to see quotes, links and all kind of small wisdom in one list.
  • I'm having bowel problems again lately, so I've created a project to heal and started tracking my food intake there. Throughout the day I keep Agenda open with it's Today view next to Things. This way I can easily see my daily food log here and append new things to it.

What I'm still struggling with is the missing iOS version of Agenda. I can collect stuff into my Inbox with Things then transfer it into Agenda on my iMac, but having access to my journals, especially from Calendar on meetings will be very useful when the iOS version arrives.