Agenda is a Personal Information Manager (PIM), one of those note-keeping programs that let you enter To-do lists, notes, contacts, etc.
It was written long before email became popular and we all switched to Outlook. Agenda version 2.0, which I fell in love with, was released in 1990 as a DOS program. Agenda was never migrated to Windows, but I ran it under the DOS emulators in progressive versions of Windows until I recently switched to Linux.
I can't think of another DOS program that I have used in the last decade. But I have always kept Agenda at hand.
Agenda was designed around entering 'notes' - short text entries. The magic was that you could assign these notes to 'categories', and eventually Agenda would start to guess what categories a note belong to when you entered it.
You could create 'views', which were different ways of looking at your notes. A view let you control the filtering, sorting, and grouping of items, and select the associated category information you wanted to show.
You didn't need to be a programmer - Lotus Agenda used the same simple, intuitive interface as the fabulously successful Lotus 123. A user could create a new view in seconds.
Like 123, Agenda was a new paradigm - a new interactive way of thinking about an old problem. But Agenda never achieved a fraction of 123's success.
Let me give an example of how I used Agenda.
For a while, I was the National Systems Manager for the Canadian subsidiary of a computer manufacturer. I had about 20 programmers reporting to me. At any time, there were about 10 'new' custom projects underway, paid enhancements or upgrades on another 20 projects, and a handful of internal projects for our own company.
There were endless meetings with clients, salesmen, resellers, and our management team. My laptop was always open. Every time a 'To-do' came up for my team, I recorded it into Agenda.
Then I would sit with the team and review our taskload. Agenda let me create views by project, by programmer, by due date, by hardware model (each product had specialized programming skills), by project stage (new, quoted, development, deploy, etc).
I knew what each programmer was doing, and when I sat with them, I could quickly update the status of each project. When I met with a salesman, I could pull up a view of his projects.
When I met with management, I could defend my resources and push back on unreasonable deadlines. I had my own list of 'To-do's as well - everything from performance appraisals to ordering computers for staff.
Deadlines were always moving - sometimes hardware was delayed, sometimes customers ran in with change requests, and sometimes the management team needed a specific project shipped THIS MONTH to meet their numbers.
Agenda helped me stay on top of it.
But the magic was this: there is no organizational 'model' that works for long. I was always tweaking the Agenda views, changing the categories, re-assigning items.
The nature of management is that there is always some new constraint, some new requirement, some new objective that had to be managed. Agenda let me keep up with my tasks - better than any other tool I have ever used.
I kept different Agenda lists for other tasks. For example, I was involved in a lawsuit, and needed to organize about 500 documents and emails for the lawyers. I created an Agenda file, entered a few words about each document, and assigned them to various categories. Once entered, I could pull up chronological reports, and instantly group the documents by different criteria.
My favourite use of Agenda is to save 'ideas'. Ideas are like butterflies, they disappear unless you pin them down. I've done this for most of the major software packages I have worked on over the years.
And I'm doing it for this rewrite of Agenda. Every time I have an idea - I try to enter it into Agenda, categorized as architectural, functional, user interface, tools, multi-user, performance, whatever.
I'm still using the old DOS version on a netbook for my ideas. And it still amazes me how agile, how PERFECT it is.
Can't wait until I can start really using the new version I'm working on.
0 comments:
Post a Comment