One-on-ones, commitments, decisions
Leading is mostly conversations, and what survives them is a handful of commitments in both directions. This guide keeps that in the day notes: preparing a one-on-one becomes a search, delegated work stays visible as your own follow-up, and a decision keeps the reason it was made for. It is a personal tool — nothing here is shared with anybody — and two sections are about the limits of that: the device it runs on, which is usually your employer's, and what does not belong in a note about a person.
A day spent talking to people
The work is other people's work, which means almost nothing you write down is yours to do alone. One file per day holds it anyway, because the unit of a week like this is a day and not a project:
Notes/2026/09/2026-09-24.md
09:00-09:30 Team jour fixe #team R/2026-09-03/P1W
10:00-10:30 One-on-one @meier #1on1
- [ ] @meier: settle the training request #1on1 !
- [>] @kern: give feedback on the estimate >2026-09-26
- [x] Signed off the Q4 budget #decision
Because of the lead times; the rest is in the note of 2026-09-17.
--- Afternoon ---
- [ ] 15:00 Call the accountant back ~
@meier is a person,
#1on1 and #decision are
tags, and the indented line under the budget is that task's own description. The bare
date in it — 2026-09-17 — is a link to that day, so the
reason for a decision stays one tap from the decision.
A contact token is letters, digits, underscores and hyphens, and a full stop ends it:
@a.meier is the contact @a.
Write @a-meier or just
@meier, and pick the form in the first week — the
statistics count what is written, not who was meant.
Because the hyphen belongs to the name, it does not end the contact:
@meier-offer is a contact of its own and not a mention
of @meier. German spelling is where that bites, since a
compound is written exactly that way — @Trelleborg-Drillmodul
is correct German and a contact who does not exist. Write the words apart
(@Trelleborg Drillmodul) or turn the line around
(drill module for @Trelleborg). Otherwise it surfaces
weeks later: the line looks right, the colour is right, and only the person's own
statistics are missing it.
Preparing a one-on-one is a search
The hard part of a one-on-one is not the half hour, it is remembering what the last
three were about. There is no list to maintain for that: search for
@meier and the days come back in order, with what was
agreed still in the line where it was written. Full-text search across every day is
free, and it ignores case and accents, so “Muller” finds “Müller”.
Tapping the contact in the side panel, or holding it in the note, opens its overview: the tasks still open with it, the appointments coming up, what got done, every line it is on by day — and how many lines and days carry it, and what became of the tasks among them: done, forwarded, dropped, still open. That last number is the useful one. “Four things open on @meier since August” is a fact about your own follow-through, not about them, and it is the kind of thing that otherwise only surfaces when something has already gone wrong.
A tag such as #1on1 on those lines lets the task list
show only that, and the filter has three states: one tap asks for a chip, a second rules
it out — “everything except #admin” — and a third clears
it. The tasks, appointments and figures in the overview and the filters are part of Pro;
writing the tokens, searching them and the overview’s list of mentions are not.
What you delegate stays your task
Handing something over does not remove it from your day, it changes what your line about it says. So it becomes a task with a date on it:
- [>] @kern: give feedback on the estimate >2026-09-26
The copy sits on the 26th and the trail stays where you wrote it, which answers both
“when did I hand this over” and “what am I waiting for”. Anything left open on a past
day shows as overdue — in the app and in the home-screen widget — until you settle it.
! and ~ sort the
important from the patient, and a time in front of a task means “not before”, so the
call that has to wait for the afternoon is out of your morning.
Be clear about what this is: your reminder, not their assignment. Nothing is sent to anybody, nobody is notified, and the other person sees none of it. tagwerk has no shared state at all — which is exactly why it can hold the half-formed thought that does not belong in the team's tracker yet.
The rhythm, and the one thing that cannot be said
A standing meeting is a line with a repeat on it, anchored to a date so it keeps the calendar's rhythm rather than yours:
09:00-09:30 Team jour fixe #team R/2026-09-03/P1W - [ ] Weekly review: what actually happened R/P1W - [ ] Board pack R/P1M #reporting
The calendar draws those on days whose file does not exist yet, as a promise rather than
a line; the day view is free, the week, month and agenda views are Pro. If your week has
a fixed shape, a weekday template gives it to every new day of that name —
templates/template-friday.md with the review headings
already in it. Templates are Pro.
Every third Thursday is a rhythm a length cannot express, so it is
written as a calendar rule instead:
R/FREQ=MONTHLY;BYDAY=3TH, and the last Friday of the
month is R/FREQ=MONTHLY;BYDAY=-1FR. That is RFC 5545,
the same rule language every calendar application speaks, and the repeat sheet writes it
for you — switch the monthly rhythm to “on a weekday of the month”. The sheet covers the
whole rule language, not only that one shape: several weekdays at once, days of the
month, months of the year, calendar weeks, which of the days a period matches, and an
end date after which nothing comes back. It shows the next dates the rule falls on, so a
rule with four parts in it can be read back off the calendar rather than out of its own
text. Anchored to a date rather than a weekday, the short form still applies
(R/P1M), and it is what the app writes wherever it
fits.
Whose phone, whose folder
Most of this work happens on a device somebody else owns, so the question of where tagwerk runs comes before the question of what you write in it.
On a company Android phone the app comes from Google Play like any other. Where your organisation runs a managed work profile, an administrator has to approve it there first — there is no separate enterprise build and no admin console on our side. The purchase is the awkward part: Pro is bought in the app through Google Play, and a managed work profile may not offer purchases at all, depending on how Play was configured for it. Then buy it elsewhere: at caliora.org/tagwerk/license on any device, or in the app where purchases work, copy the licence text in the settings, and paste it under “Import licence” on the other device or profile. The licence is bound to no device and has no expiry.
Sync belongs on your employer's infrastructure, not in a private cloud. If there is a company Nextcloud, ownCloud or any WebDAV share, that is the right target, and then work notes live where work data is meant to live — the sync guide is the setup.
What IT will ask about is permissions, and the list is short: internet, network state, one to put the widget's midnight refresh back after a reboot, and the Play billing permission. Not your contacts, not your location, not the camera, and no access to the file system beyond the one folder you hand over through the system picker.
What IT does not get is just as short: no managed configuration to push policies with, no single sign-on, no admin console, no volume licences, and no way for anyone to see what you wrote. tagwerk is a personal app that happens to run on a company device.
The company PC has an answer now, with a caveat. The Windows version is in the Microsoft Store — but a managed machine often blocks the Store or forbids installing anything at all, and that is the employer's call, not ours. Where it is blocked, the answer on that machine stays the files themselves: they are Markdown in the folder you sync, and any editor on the PC opens them. On Linux the app comes from the Snap Store, free.
What belongs in a note about a person
This is the paragraph that matters more than any feature on this page, and it is worth being blunt about, because the app will not stop you either way.
Where the notes live decides half of it. On a company phone syncing to a company server, notes about the people you lead sit on your employer's own infrastructure, and the rules that apply are your organisation's: how long such notes are kept, who may read them, and — where there is a works council — whether a tool the employer hands out is something they have a say in. The same notes on a private phone in a private cloud are a processing of personal data your employer answers for and cannot see, which is the situation worth not creating. Either way the second half is the same:
What belongs: what was agreed, what you promised, what you owe them by when, dates, the next step. Notes that exist so you do your part. What does not: assessments of a person, anything about health or private circumstances, records kept for a conflict or a dismissal. Those are the employer's business, they belong in whatever system your organisation runs for them, and in most European jurisdictions they are a processing of personal data that is not yours to keep, wherever the phone came from. This is not legal advice; the person who can give it in your organisation is the one to ask before you start.
The facts you need in order to decide, plainly:
- There is no app lock. No PIN, no fingerprint, no separate password. Whoever unlocks the phone can read the notes.
- Nothing is encrypted at rest. The notes are plain files, on the device and on whatever server you sync them to.
- Android's own backup takes them along while they sit in the app's folder, which is where they start. Pick a folder of your own and they are outside that backup; in a managed work profile, where that backup goes is an administrator's setting rather than yours.
- A second profile keeps work in its own folder with its own sync and its own accent colour — separate spaces rather than one pile. Creating one is Pro; switching between existing ones is free.
Read the other way round, that list is also the argument for writing this here rather than in a hosted notes app: there is no account, no telemetry and no server of ours, so what you write about the people you work with stays on the hardware your organisation already trusts and does not become a third party's asset. It just does not become a safe either.
What it costs, and what it is not
Free: the whole syntax, today's tasks and everything overdue, the day view, full-text search across every day, the revision history, the ZIP export, the widget for today and the one for quick capture. tagwerk Pro is €12 / US$12 once, no subscription, covering every platform we ship: the task list across all days with its filters, the week, month and agenda views, day templates, the statistics behind tags and contacts, WebDAV sync inside the app, colours for tags, and more than one profile.
What it is not, and will not become: a team tool. No board, no assignment, no shared state, nothing another person can see or be notified by. No attachments, so no CVs and no PDFs. No import from a tracker, a calendar or an HR system. It is one person's notebook, which is the only thing it is trying to be — and on the platform side, Android, Windows and Linux are the released apps, and iOS and macOS are planned, with no date yet.
Something missing here, or something wrong? Write to , or open an issue in the tracker.