Prepending to Living Agenda Documents

Imagine you have a recurring meeting with an agenda open to contributions by all participants. Many meetings in the workplace are like this:

1:1s
Sprint demos
Team operational reviews

Perhaps the agenda is written in a Google Doc or a Confluence page. Say have your first meeting on January 3rd. The document will look something like this:

# January 3rd
- Party cleanup (10 minutes)
- Goal review (20 minutes)

Here’s the living agenda document for January 10th:

# January 3rd
- Party cleanup (10 minutes)
- Goal review (20 minutes)

# January 10th
- Printer paper (5 minutes)
- Lunch menu (15 minutes)

You may notice a pattern. Each meeting, the latest agenda gets lower on the page. By the fifth meeting or so, the scrolling becomes tedious.

Enter prepending! It looks like this:

# January 10th
- Printer paper (5 minutes)
- Lunch menu (15 minutes)

# January 3rd
- Party cleanup (10 minutes)
- Goal review (20 minutes)

Enjoy!

For the computer scientists out there, note that the most common access patterns are:

peeking the top item, and
pushing a new top item.

That sounds like a stack! That’s why it’s better to prepend to the agenda. It’s more efficient to access the head of a linked list, O(1), than the tail, O(n). That’s not entirely true since you can hit Command + Down on Mac or End on Windows to jump to the bottom of a document in a browser, but not everyone knows that!

Prepending to Living Agenda Documents

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