Legend Examples: Work Journal (Part 2)

Written by Tim Lutero

Let’s pick up where we left off in Part 1.

This setup is great if you are working with a relatively small journal or just using the journal as a task list. But if you take a lot of notes for your work or school, sooner or later (sooner!) your tasks will be swallowed up in all those notes and you’ll lose focus on what needs to be done.

The tasks pane

Thankfully, Legend is powerful enough to pull those tasks out of your journal so you can see them easily and even group them on the fly!

Let’s start by closing the calendar pane (don’t worry, we’ll add it back!) and adding a List view pane, grouped by Priority and sorted by Date:

You’ll see a flattened view of your journal but we are going to tweak a few things by doing the following:

1. Click on the filter/search bar at the top of the pane.
2. In the graphical filter interface, click the Task icon in the Type row.

Once you start setting priorities on your tasks you can very easily see what to work on next!

Returning to the calendar pane

Let’s add the monthly calendar back in:

This is okay if you have a large monitor or if you don’t mind scrolling. However, if you like to keep a clean workspace you may want to consider closing the calendar pane and creating a list pane sorted by date instead:

Unreviewed tasks

As your Journal grows longer after time, you will now be able to see your tasks at a glance, both by priority and by date.

If you have the screen real estate on a larger monitor instead of just a laptop screen, you can go one step further and add what I like to call a “Sweep” pane. Any good task management system will allow you to review all open tasks and easily re-prioritize them as circumstances change. Let’s go ahead and add a list pane no grouping and sorted by created date, then filter it for tasks with NO priority and NO date:

Then, since we are listing tasks with no priority, adjust your tasks pane to only include low priority tasks or higher:

Which results in the following four panes in your master board:

Here is one way to consider the maintenance of this type of setup. You complete your work from left to right:

• Entering notes and identifying tasks (journal pane)
• Selecting tasks to work on by priority (tasks pane)
• Completing or progressing work with specific deadlines (dated tasks pane)

But you manage your work from right to left:

• Setting priorities, dates and tags on unreviewed tasks (sweep pane)
• Adjusting task priorities based on due date (dated tasks pane)
• Adjusting priorities for tasks competing for attention based on evolving circumstances (tasks pane)
• Pre-filling the journal with upcoming meetings, archiving past days of work (journal pane)

There are, of course, several other ways to refine the board and other advanced techniques such as tagging and custom filters that aren’t covered here but are covered elsewhere in the help file. Hopefully this example will give you ideas for how large and how complex you want your setup to be!

Without tasks

One of the things to be aware of in this setup is that every task needs to be set as a task item in order to show up in the task panes. For those who would prefer to keep tasks separate, you can still set up Legend to display a notes journal in one pane and tasks in another pane but still within the same board:

While the screenshot above is ungrouped and sorted by priority, you may prefer to group by priority and then sort by date.

While this setup allows you to keep your tasks separate, you can still easily identify tasks from your notes journal (this is helpful when you don’t want to break up the “flow” of your note-taking but want to make sure not to forget a task you put into notes instead of the tasks pane).

One way to accomplish this is to star the items in your notes journal (with the Ctrl+8 keyboard shortcut), which highlights them.

PRO TIP: You can also configure the filter in the tasks pane to show all highlighted items as is shown in the screenshot above. The advanced filter query is:

is:plain or is:star

At a convenient time, you can just drag the item into the tasks pane (or of course use the Alt+M keyboard shortcut), set its priority and remove the star (again with the Ctrl+8 keyboard shortcut).