Legend Use Case Study 1: Conference Notes

For many kinds of software, case studies are the best way to get an idea about how the app works, and how you might use it. With that in mind, I am starting what I intend will be a series of case studies for using Legend.

In my earlier article about Legend, I said that I used it as a digital bullet journal. In this case study, I want to demonstrate how I temporarily expanded my bullet journal to take notes while recently at a conference, where I was staffing an exhibit table for the nonprofit agency I work for. I’ve created a fictitious demo journal and conference for this show and tell.

My standard bullet journal setup in Legend looks like this (this is a fictitious demo version).

My regular bullet journal set up is just two panes:

• Daily Log, in which I keep a chronologic listing of rapid log notes. I prepopulate the Daily Log with a list of every day of the year using text files I’ve previously set up. This pane uses outline view with no filters selected.
• Open Tasks, which combs my Daily Log for tasks I haven’t marked as complete. This pane is set up in list view, which removes the hierarchy. It is filtered, of course, to show only tasks that have not been marked as complete.

I set this set up as the default view for the board by right-clicking on the board title and selecting “Save as default view.” I can’t emphasize enough how handy this feature is. I can now navigate to any other part of my document or even another document altogether and instantly return to the default view by right-clicking again on the board title and selecting “Return to default view.”

Now I navigate to the Collections section of my journal and add a collection called “XYZ Conference.” I restore my default view, and create an item in the Daily Log that says:

[] Set up exhibit at [[XYZ Conference]]

This creates a link to the conference collection. When I hover the cursor over that link, I little pop up appears telling me if depress COMMAND plus SHIFT and click on the link, XYZ Conference collection opens in a third pane for this board.

Filters might be applied to this new pane. I just deselect them. And I may need to switch the view from list to outline.

But now I can add notes about things specific to this conference while keeping my bullet journal views available. When it is time to report to my colleagues about what I learned at the conference, I’ve got all the information handy. When no longer needed I just close that pane and return to my normal bullet journal view.

My bullet journal now has three panes, including one for taking conference notes.

I hope it is clear that using a temporary extra pane in your regular view can be useful for just about anything. If you have a meeting you want to take notes for, use this same process.

You can also reverse things. Take all your notes in your daily log area, then open a third pane with a specific collection and drag the related notes into that pane… or you can mirror your notes so you retain a copy in your daily log and in the appropriate collection.

I could, of course, have kept my default bullet journal board as is and just set up a separate board with a single pane for recording my conference notes. I prefer the way I did it, so I have my other daily log entries as a reference. But you might choose something different. That’s the beauty of Legend: there is no prescribed way to use it.