ThinkingRock Forum

One idea of David Allen's, in his book, that I found useful in my prior foray into GTD was "agendas." Basically, a special category with longer notes, or lists, of topics that belong with a certain person or group, like a committee I belong to. For example, items to be discussed at the next committee meeting. These were not the same as Projects because they were not a series of separate actions, just a text list of different items. Nor were they Actions, and I don't think having a bunch of actions with a context of, say, "Steering Committee", is exactly what I want, either. I'd like a way to generate a single note in TR that could contain all agenda items.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a good way to implement agendas in Thinking Rock? Or is this something that needs to be added to the app?

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Teach only love, for that is what you are. (A Course in Miracles)

We are planning to add a field to actions, projects and items where the user can enter a file pathname or an hyperlink, etc... So you could 'attach' your agenda using that field?

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Claire
ThinkingRock Analyst and Tester

Sounds like that will work! Thanks.

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Teach only love, for that is what you are. (A Course in Miracles)

If you check the GTD book, you will find that DA considers the "agendas" category as a context where you store "actions" just like any other context. Every agenda item is really an action - either a presentation or a discussion or such. I have a set of regular meetings and each one is a context: "Staff Meeting Agenda" for example. In that context I put any next action that needs to be brought up at that meeting. By the time the meeting day comes around, all I have to do is decide what order I am going to put them in and I have my agenda for that meeting. I do a similar thing for the people who report to me. I have a "people agenda" for each person who reports to me. I meet with each employee on a monthly basis, and between meetings I add actions to his/her context as they occur to me so that I have a complete agenda for the next meeting with that employee. If another opportunity comes up in between the regular meetings for us to meet, I can quickly refer to his/her context to see if there is something I want to cover while we are meeting. I also have a "Boss Agenda" context so that I not only have the set of actions that my boss is expecting from me but I also have the items and issues that I want to discuss with him. For me, "agendas" are definitely full of actions!

Something that occurred to me that might be useful would be the ability to flag a project so that only the project title appeared in the action list, but not the actions underneath it.

So I could have a project entitled "Prepare for review meeting", for example, that I could add actions to. Those actions are effectively the agenda items (and maybe some others e.g. "print 5 copies of last minutes") but I don't want them all cluttering up the list of actions.

At present I put them into the notes field and print a project detail report to take with me to the meeting but sometimes it would be nice to have things that can be ticked off more explicitly.

Is this the same thing as Agendas and would it be a sensible way to implement them?

Projects are not actions. Projects go on project lists. Actions go on action lists. If you don't want your agenda items cluttering up your list of actions, set them to inactive and don't tick the inactive box on the Actions screen.

Why are you looking for something that is the "same" as Agendas? Why not just use Agendas? If you want something to tick off more explicitly, print a report for just the Agendas context for that meeting and you will get a list of your agenda items.

Putting projects on an action list is NOT GTD! One of the things that I am most impressed with TR is the developers' commitment to following the GTD philosophy. I have read a number of reviews where TR is acclaimed as one of - if not the - truest incorporations of the GTD philosophy. I'm hoping that it stays that way!

That's one of the things I love about GTD, and found it very useful. I use the Agenda templates from DIY http://www.diyplanner.com/ and now I use TR as well.

In addition to having an Agenda for people who report to me and people I report to, I also have Agendas for other people I interact with on a regular basis. For example, people in other departments, people in other companies, etc.
One of the things I wish TR had is the ability to select multiple contexts to print a report. That way, if I'm going to meet with 5 or 6 people throughout the day, I could print the Agendas I have for each one in a faster way.

Hi Eddie,

I have added your suggestion about ability to select multiple contexts for report to our list of future functionality.

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Claire
ThinkingRock Analyst and Tester

Because Agendas are not explicitly supported by TR.

Have I missed something?

Apparently. Agendas are contexts just like "@work" or "@computer." TR doesn't "explicitly" support them either, but TR explicitly supports contexts.

TR does not explicitly or implicitly support putting project titles into action lists. Neither does David Allen or GTD. Using Agendas is a way to achieve what you were suggesting that is at least implicitly supported by TR and is explicitly supported by David Allen and GTD.

My point was that the developers of TR have several times expressed their intention of staying true to the basic concepts of GTD. One of the most basic concepts is putting only actions on the action lists. Putting projects - even just titles - on action lists does not fit.

Hear hear for selecting multiple contexts!

I do second the request for multiple-context reports (and views, would be nice too). It would also be nice to be able to mark an action as "Anywhere", so that it shows up in all contexts (currently I have a separate context "@Anywhere" for things that I can do no matter where I am, but having it as a separate context means I explicitely have to look at it, not very practical).

For agendas, I am still experimenting with how to handle them in TR. Currently I have a context named "Agendas", and I create individual actions in that context, prefixed by the person name, for example "John: talk about foo bar". When I view that context, I sort the actions by title, and I have all my agendas nicely grouped by person to whom they correspond.

Hi, I have the same need too

I have several context for job tasks and other for personal tasks and it will be great to be able to select multi contexts

idea is for example to avoid to have only one big context for job context and to avoid to have no filter (for have several contexts) and to have on the same screen in the office professionnal and personnal tasks

Best regards

Fab

You shouldn't need multiple contexts for an action if they are defined properly, but I know that takes some time and some tweaking. Contexts should be hard edges in your landscape and define the conditions required for the actions. For example, @Calls can sometimes be tough because can you really make that call in your car on your cellphone? You may need to break that down and have contexts @Calls-Office, @Calls-Home, @Calls-Anywhere.

Define your contexts in a separate list if you have to or use the description field in TR. In TR, @Computer is defined as "My laptop computer". @Computer-Online is defined "My laptop computer online" and @Online is "Any internet access". I suppose I could break it down futher and use @Computer-Office, @Computer-Home and @Computer-Anywhere, but I haven't found that need yet.

I too use a Context of @Agenda and have topics for my various contacts ("Agenda-Jeff", "Agenda-Dean", etc.). I personally don't see a need to change the action with another "Agenda With" field or something like that.

Eric