Yeah I’ve been using Agenda. I love it. Its killer feature is that it can attach notes to calendar events, dates, or date ranges. re: “medium term perspective”, it works great for breaking down goals / milestones.
What I do is, for a goal w/ a target date or deadline, I create a note starting from today until that date. So when I look at “Today,” it will show up there. Then I can create notes for smaller milestones. This has the effect of showing me what I’m actively working on to work towards the main goal.
- I pin items that are goals, meaning they show up at the tops of their respective projects. These are key outcomes that I’m working towards
- notes that appear below those are sub-goals, milestones, objectives, whatever you want to call them… essentially actions I’m taking to work towards that main goal
I’ve got this goal of “Goal 1” that I would like to achieve by 8/18/21. Well, I’m not sure exactly how to do that, but I have some good things to try this week: action 1, action 2, action 3. I created notes for each of those, assigned to this week. How this reads to me is, “My long-term goal is to achieve Goal 1. Here’s what I’m doing this week to get there.” And from there, I’ve chosen to include weekly data within a single note, because it’s a simple daily checklist. But if my actions were more complex, I could create one per day.
I’ve got this other goal, “Goal 2.” I have a few key things that I want to do to get there, but I’m currently not planning on doing anything with them this week. “Action 1” is a pretty big one, so most likely I’ll create a note that spans roughly 3 or 4 months, with a week note that is something like “Do Action 1 three times weekly.”
It’s a way of helping me set one key goal, and break it down into multiple subgoals, with their own objectives and timelines. And I can be flexible about the scope and timeline of everything.
Below those goals are some projects I’ve got going on. “Project 1” is a commitment I made, so I want it on my radar until it’s done. The thing I’m doing this week to get there is “Prepare final draft.” And then “Meeting w/ Boss” is a one-off meeting I have later today, so I’ve taken some notes of things I want to talk about with him.
I really like that I can have context for everything I’m working on… the long-term goals, the mid-range milestones, and the daily / weekly nitty gritty of what I’m doing.
I hope that helps. I’m happy to respond to any other questions.
Also, I think you could totally do this in Tinderbox as well. In fact, my experience with these sorts of tools is that once I understand their process / perspective, I can model it in Tinderbox, and I usually do. But in this case, I like using Agenda because its interface is so nice, and it supports iOS and syncs across devices.