I’m a meetings guy. Largely not by choice, but a lot of my work day is meetings.
One of the biggest traps of meetings is that, unless they are very well facilitated (spoiler alert: many aren’t), it gets really easy for agreements or commitments to be made but then later lost or never acted on.
After all, saying stuff is easy.
I’ve found just the right solution to this that works for me, though, and so I wanted to write about it.
It was only a few months ago that I discovered Agenda which, after I’d spent a great deal of time looking for a solid note-taking/storing app, was a great relief.
Agenda’s main conceit is that each note belongs not only to a project (which in turn belongs to a category for organization nirvana), but can also be linked to a date or specific calendar event. In this way, content is searchable by topics and times, giving me multidimensional control over how my content is arranged.
Moreover, Agenda, though it writes in its own kind of editor experience, can export content in Markdown, making it wildly recyclable and reusable.
All of this adds up to my ability to take great thoughtstream-based notes that link to meetings that clearly identify notes and actions/commitments.
The magic happens, though, when I share Markdown from Agenda to this iOS Shortcut I built. That shortcut takes the Markdown from Agenda, identifies lines that are actions, pastes them to OmniFocus (since they get converted to TaskPaper format), and then organizes an email I can then send to all participants.
In this way, I can store content for later reference in Agenda, track the actions through OmniFocus, and create a trail of agreement by sharing all of this.
So as easy as it might be to say things, this means everything said really means something. Nothing lost, nothing left behind.
And that’s something.
