Re: Managing appts with org-mode, diary

[Michael Welle <mwe012008@gmx.net>]

Hello,

Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org> writes:

> Michael Welle <mwe012008@gmx.net> writes:
>
>> currently I create diary entries for my appointments, the appointments
>> are marked in the calendar. This is handy because if I want to create a
>> new appointment I can overview a three month period and I can see at a
>> glance which days are already blocked.
>>
>> Now I want to manage my appointments in a more project centric
>> way. For instance I work at ten projects that have ten corresponding org
>> files. Now I note appointments for a certain project in the
>> corresponding org file. The appointments are still marked in my
>> calendar, but that is unusable slow. 
>
> Yes, unfortunately marking org-mode entries makes the calendar is
> extremely slow. IMO, the only way to use org-mode as a substitute for
> the diary is to turn off calendar marking, either with the variable
> calendar-mark-diary-entries-flag or by putting an ampersand in front of
> the org-diary line in your diary file, e.g.,
>
> &%%(org-diary :timestamp :sexp)
that's what I've done for the moment. But the feature is useless for me
if I can't see at a glance which days are already blocked with
appointments. If I'm at a customer's site or phone with one, I can't do
clickclickwaitandherenowclickclickwaitsomemoreetc ;). I have to
clickclick and propose an appointment next wednesday ;).


>> If I use the per month org agenda view the display is way to confusing
>> to get an overview and decide on which day I can make a new
>> appointment.
>>
>> How do you deal with this problem? I can imagine to generate a
>> ~/.diary file every time I add or change an appointment in org mode.
>> This would speed up the process of displaying the calendar. An agenda
>> view that shows a three month period or so and that has all the sub
>> nodes of the days hidden might help, too. Then days, that have already
>> appointments, are marked and you have to show the sub nodes if you
>> need detailed information about appointments of that day.
>
> I'm afraid a three month view wouldn't be any faster than marking three
> months in the calendar. The bottleneck is the time it takes org-mode to
> generate three months worth of agenda entries.
Yepp. That's why I played with the idea to generate a diary file or
something like that if an appointment is created or changed -or in
general, if an event occurs-. This involves the danger that one might
work with outdated data, but would speed up things a great deal.


>> Is somethind like that already implemented and I haven't
>> found it yet ;)? Any hints are welcome.
>
> Three suggestions:
>
> 1. Use a custom agenda command to display a weekly calendar with
>    appointments only.
Looks like a good starting point. I will try it and see how it feels
using it.


> 2. Use the fancy diary display to view upcoming appointments.
I currently use fancy diary. It's nice to have an overview of the
current day and the upcoming appointments of the next n days. But this
'oh, there is an important appointment in {three|two|one|zero} days'
clutters the agenda view even more ;). This is where it would be nice to
have the agenda view tree like, too. The days could be nodes and the
appointments could be subnode of the day, that could be shown or
hidden. I'm relatively new to org-mode (convertit from planner-mode as
you might know ;-), so I don't know exactly if such a feature is already
implemented or if it could be done without huge amounts of work.

Thanks for sharing your ideas. If anybody else has to say something
about this topic, don't hesitate. I'm interested in your opinions and
ideas, not only down to a technical level but also how you use org-mode,
how your 'processes' are etc.

Regards
hmw

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