Total, Relaxed Organization, The Blog

Trog Bar displays your meeting agendas automatically, at the right times, if you process tasks and appointments correctly. It’s easy once you get the hang of it. Here’s how to make it work.

First, remember that Total, Relaxed Organization and GTD teach you to assign contexts and/or categories to your tasks when you process them. We refer to this as tagging. With that in mind, we’re ready for the rules for agendas in Trog Bar.

Rules for Automatic Agendas

Tag Alike. To make automatic agendas work in Trog, tag appointments and their related tasks with the same context or category. This tells Trog that you want to see those tasks with that appointment. This works for all tasks and appointments in both regular and strategic calendars, regardless of what other categories are assigned to the task.

View Agendas. To see an agenda for a meeting, you have a few options:

1. Use TaskSense Now. This task list view constantly gives you an intelligent list of recommended tasks to work on at the moment. As the meeting approaches, your agenda will appear automatically.
2. Click Next Appointment or Prev Appointment. Click the Next Appointment or Prev Appointment buttons in the task toolbar (middle of Trog Bar). This shifts your tasks to a list tailored to a specific time slot. Keep clicking until you reach the right meeting. This lets you preview the agenda before the meeting or lock it in when a meeting runs over.
3. Show Related Tasks. You can also right click in the appointment list or pop-out calendar bar and choose Show Related Tasks. This immediately focuses the task list on items for that meeting or appointment.
4. Show Meeting Category. At any time, you can click the Task List Selection button (just below the task toolbar in the middle of Trog Bar), hover over Categories, and select a meeting category. All active agenda items for the meeting will be displayed.

Understand the Agenda Category Rule. The Agenda Category Rule appears on the Trog Bar options screen. (Click[+] near the upper right corner.) Tasks tagged with any category matching the Agenda Category Rule are suppressed from general lists until the appointment approaches. This keeps them out of your way until needed. (Agenda items are things you’ve essentially scheduled into regular, recurring meetings, so there is no need to see them until then. However, you always have the option of seeing that list ahead of time, whenever you want. See above.) Agenda items are always displayed in the All Tasks list and when searching the TaskSense list, regardless of the Agenda Category Rule.

BTW, the asterisk (*) in the Agenda Category Rule just means “any characters.” Therefore, a rule of “~*” means “any category starting with ~ is an agenda category.”

NOTE: For GTDers, we recommend an Agenda Category rule like ~* or #*, anything OTHER THAN @* (which conflicts with David Allen’s recommended context names).