From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Piotr Zielinski" Subject: Re: GTD, Projects, and Next Actions in org-mode Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2006 14:38:37 +0100 Message-ID: <3c12eb8d0608040638q1138acc6yc92bb2cef476ad9d@mail.gmail.com> References: <3dbac09fcc4853019690ee76c8c4a73f@science.uva.nl> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1G8zsv-00040U-E5 for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Fri, 04 Aug 2006 09:38:41 -0400 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1G8zst-00040I-1N for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Fri, 04 Aug 2006 09:38:40 -0400 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1G8zss-00040F-S0 for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Fri, 04 Aug 2006 09:38:38 -0400 Received: from [66.249.82.234] (helo=wx-out-0506.google.com) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.52) id 1G8zwS-0003KD-0k for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Fri, 04 Aug 2006 09:42:20 -0400 Received: by wx-out-0506.google.com with SMTP id i26so98147wxd for ; Fri, 04 Aug 2006 06:38:37 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: Content-Disposition: inline List-Id: "General discussions about Org-mode." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: emacs-orgmode-bounces+geo-emacs-orgmode=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: emacs-orgmode-bounces+geo-emacs-orgmode=m.gmane.org@gnu.org To: "Jason F. McBrayer" Cc: emacs-orgmode On 03/08/06, Jason F. McBrayer wrote: > I thought I'd ask to see how other people who are using org for > Getting Things Done are handling projects and their relationship to > Next Actions. Thanks for bringing up this topic. You're definitely not alone with this problem, and I'd also like to know how others use org-mode for GTD stuff. I have a headline "* projects" with individual projects as second-level headlines, sorted (manually and approximately) from the most-important to the least important. To mark "next action" items I just use the TODO keyword. (Alternatively you can define a special NEXTACTION keyword or tag.) If I need to see the global list of my nextaction items I use one of the following commands: org-show-todo-tree (C-c C-v), org-tags-sparse-tree (C-c \), org-agenda. A bit of self-publicity here: I find context-menus of org-mouse.el useful for invoking these commands. Allen recommends keeping all your info as a series of various lists, but the advantage of org-mode is that some of those lists (such as the list of current nextaction items) can be autogenerated every time it's needed and not kept anywhere explicitly. Apart from the "*projects" headline, I also have a "*todo" headline, where I put all the todo items which are not clearly assignable to a specific project (or when I simply don't have the time for finding the appropriate project to put them under). Once every while, I go through the "*todo" hierachy and move some items into the appropriate projects. Sometimes groups of entries in the "*todo" hierarchy evolve to the point of becoming a separate project by themselves. This might look like a mess, but actually it allows me to spend more time doing things than organizing them. Actually, I was lying a bit: I don't have one "*projects" headlines, but several of them: "*research activities", "*research projects", "*other projects", all sorted from most-current to least-current. I recommend having separate project lists only if you have a clear-cut distinction between them. I also periodically move all projects further than 10-15 places from the top of each list to one common list "* one day / maybe". Piotr