Blast from the Past: Lotus Agenda for GTD
September 3rd, 2007 | by GTD Wannabe |I’ve just spent an enjoyable couple of hours playing with an old DOS version of Lotus Agenda. Rosemary, a reader, suggested the software to me, as she noticed a strong resemblance between it and my favourite software, EverNote. (Thanks for the email Rosemary!)
She pointed me towards a link where you can download Agenda, but unfortunately, it’s by subscription only. However, since Google is my friend, I was able to find this excellent site on all things Agenda-related.
Lotus Agenda
What is this anyway? Well, it’s an older piece of software from the DOS days. Running it is like a blast from the past – there is no mousing at all, which is actually what I love about it.
Another thing I love about it is that it’s smart, like Stikkit smart. In other words, if I set up categories in advance, incoming items (read next actions) can be filtered automatically into specific project and context categories.
The best I can describe it is as kind of a free-form database, where you can have different dimensions (categories) and different views. Like EverNote, automatic category assignment is possible, and that’s where its power comes in.
GTD on Lotus Agenda
After just playing around with it for a couple of hours, I’m convinced that Agenda is a viable offline solution for Getting Things Done.
Check out this screen shot. It’s possible to set up myriad views on your data. This one, I call my Inbox. It shows all my next actions, with columns also for potential due dates (which are read from the text of the next item), project (also read from the text) and context (also read from the text). So, after creating the categories properly, all I have to do is add a next action, and the remaining columns are filled in automatically.
I can also have other views, like one showing all next items by project (or even in one project), or all next items by context (or even in one context). I can also have a view that just shows me items with due dates. Here are a couple other views that I whipped up:
Conclusion
Lotus Agenda, albeit old, is an amazingly powerful piece of software. I thoroughly enjoyed using it, and may come back to it again to see if I can tweak it into a personal GTD system. A couple of things to get used to though:
- It’s an old DOS program, which comes with some limitations, e.g., I can’t get the screen to show any more detail, even though I was able to increase the font to a readable size.
- It uses system beeps when you do something wrong, or navigate too far in one direction. I can’t find a way to turn that off.
- It uses F1 through F10 for menu commands, which means I have to turn off any other software that depends on those keys for global access.
- I can’t quite figure out how to make use of a deferred start date. I figure there’s probably a way; I just haven’t found it.
Although it’s an old piece of software, this thing is smart. I’d recommend playing with it to see if you can customize your own system. There’s also a ton of macros, etc., that I haven’t even looked at yet.
6 Responses to “Blast from the Past: Lotus Agenda for GTD”
By Mike Brown on Sep 3, 2007 | Reply
Ah, Lotus Agenda. “A spreadsheet for words.”
The journalist James Fallows wrote a popular piece on Agenda for the Atlantic magazine back in the late ’90s, just as Lotus pulled the plug on Agenda. Fallows used it to hold large chunks of transcribed interviews and notes on stories, which the software automatically tagged for him. (He used it in convert with Grandview, Symantec’s DOS outline software.)
I went whole hog for Agenda (still have 2 boxed copies of the stuff), wrote macros, imported Compuserve forum messages into it, used it for what we’d now call ‘productivity,’ got copies of a newsletter dedicated to it (and some fiendishly clever apps were described therein).
I still get wistful thinking about how powerful that software was and how long it’s taken for some of its more powerful text functions (like interpreting “next Tuesday” into an actual date).
But Agenda had trouble when its file size grew past a couple of megabytes, it’s tough to cut and paste info to or from it, and so on. Still, great software and there’s still nothing really quite like it around nowadays.
By Chris on Sep 3, 2007 | Reply
Gosh. Lotus Agenda, boy does that bring back memories. I had a career based on Lotus 1-2-3 for a few years. I recall being fascinated by Agenda and in love with Lotus Magellan as well… Magellan wasn’t as fast as Norton Commander, but boy could it do “stuff!”
Getting a GTD system going with Agenda is such a delightfully geeky thing to ponder. :-)
By Troy on Sep 4, 2007 | Reply
Wow, defintely a blast from the past!
I used Agenda for a long long time. It really was a great program and it finally took ‘ecco 1.0′ to come along in the windows world to replace it for my use.
By Robert on Sep 5, 2007 | Reply
Nifty and I can imagine it was extremely ahead of it’s time.
Though, I think setting up a GTD system using it now would be kinda pointless (other than for bragging rights, out-geeking, I guess) since the whole reason I like EverNote is the ability to hit a hotkey and have it pop-up as soon as I have something to write down.
Now I just wish Google Notebook could be launched with a hotkey like that.
By GTD Wannabe on Sep 27, 2007 | Reply
Thanks for the comments guys. I think I might almost be over my crush on Agenda (I found something new to tweak), but for a couple of weeks, I just couldn’t stay away from it. It’s got a couple of great things going for it: the ability to assign categories based on text in the item itself, and the fact that you can (rather have to) use the keyboard for everything.
I actually did create a working GTD system with it; there was a little difficulty with deferred start dates, but I figured out away around it. Bragging rights – maybe, but I just think the guts of the software are so elegant. Where else can I get that automatic recognition, and the ability to create customized views on my data, on the fly? Fascinating. I might still keep playing with it, but I really wish someone would drag it 20 years into the future.
I did hear that Chandler was the successor, but to me, it seems a completely different beast. For one thing, I don’t want the emphasis to be on email. For another, it’s the automatic category assignment that really drew me in, which Chandler doesn’t seem to have.
And Robert, yes EverNote definitely rocks. I use it for all of my research notes. I’ve tried to make it work for GTD too, but I’ve decided that I really need my next actions list to be separate from all of my other stuff. As for launching Google Notebook – I wonder if there’s some way, either with Grease Monkey, or maybe the new AIR stuff, to make that work.
By Pierre Paul Landry on Aug 13, 2008 | Reply
Lotus Agenda was great. Ecco Pro took some aspects of it and I used it for many years. I needed more flexibility, IO and computing power, and since Ecco was long dead, I started to build my own app 5 years ago, If you are interested in this kink of app, check out http://www.sqlnotes.net