A couple of weeks ago I read a long article about Lotus Agenda. I had heard of Agenda before – I had read man times that it was a much beloved niche product that was way ahead of it's time. You can read this particular article yourself – I'm not going to repeat its thoughts and conclusions here.

But if you know me well enough, you know I went down the rabbit hole and I read more and found a copy to download. Not because I was going to move to it – but because I wanted to try it out. I like it a lot but in the recesses of forums and articles, people said that the instaling the Presidental Planner macros added… well, so much more. So I grabbed that as well and played with that integration.

My experiments with Lotus Agenda and the Presidential Planner add-on was enlightening. It does things that no other modern app does now. I mean, it's an old DOS app but the functionality of the whole thing was terrific, despite showing it's age with function keys to do most of the stuff.

To use it was easy: just start typing.

pay the light bill tomorrow

And… just leave it there. Soon it will turn into a task:

<tomorrow date> pay the light bill  TODO

I did nothing to make that happen – I just typed that in.

If I have put in:

expense the gas for the business trip

Soon (5-10 mins) I'll see something in the expense view for that. I still have to put the amount in (something I've little perplexed over) but it just makes it into a list.

A fantastic one was this:

get new paint for House

Note the capital letter. Not only will that be a Todo item but I will magicially have a category called House that I can search for and just see the list of things in that category.

You are thinking "Well that doesn't seem too hard" but it apparently it is, because none of the todo apps I've ever tried has done things like this. Todoist gets close but it doesn't auto-categorize. Amazing Marvin (my current app), Remember the Milk, even TickTick (which I experimented with after my Agenda experiment). Remember: this is a DOS application written in 1990. There is no LLM, it doesn't even know what a network is, let alone the Internet. It just runs locally.

This honestly is as close to my ultimate wish in a Todo app as I have ever seen. I can put in a notes that are a stream of consciousness and out of it will come a distilled list of things that I can do. Later on, I can organize them, schedule them and put them on my timeblock. I keep thinking that something will come out that will do all this and it doesn't. But maybe it already has – in 1990.

After being in Agenda and playing with things a bit, the magic kind of faded a bit. Overall the parser is great but then you realize Agenda only takes a simple statement and then uses the wording to see if it's a Todo or a note-to-self, an expense or whatever else it supports. It doesn't learn from your text and it doesn't get smarter. Mostly it teaches you how to insert items. And there is nothing wrong with that but at end of the day, it's not different than Amazing Marvin or Todoist…only that Agenda has a much smarter parser.

As I started thinking about how much I would like something I could have a stream of consciousness to a perfect group of tasks, I realized that my current workflow is already doing all that. For the past few months, I've been utilizing my Bullet Journal. When I have a thought, a todo or even a feeling, it jot it down and then at the end of the day I go through it and schedule tasks my tasks in Amazing Marvin or simply read my thoughts or maybe cancel something. I like the fact that it isn't automatically put on my working list… that filter of "is this really want I want to do?" is very helpful.

I think productivity tools should hit a sweet spot between Agenda's intelligence and a Bullet Journal's friction. We need tools that can figure out our goals based on what we write, yet still help us reflect on whether those goals align with our true intentions.

Maybe it took a 30-year-old DOS application to help me realize that, for now, my notebook and pen will continue to be my first draft.

What tools have you found that balance automation with intentionality?