Use case of TIMESTAMP, SCHEDULED and DEADLINE

[Christian Egli <christian.egli@novell.com>]

Hi all

I live in Org-Agenda Week mode. This is where I look at my tasks for
today and for the rest of the week.

So the typical use case for me is that I take notes for a certain
project, let's say I have in my desktop-project.org 

* Desktop Training
** Call Trainer
   clarify the content of the training
** Setup training room
** prepare desktop machines
** Training is on April 18th

As you can see I mix notes and tasks. Ok, now the first three are tasks
so I C-c C-t on them which changes desktop-project.org as follows:

* Desktop Training
** TODO Call Trainer
   clarify the content of the training
** TODO Setup training room
** TODO prepare desktop machines
** Training is on April 18th

I know that the training is on the 18th so I need to do the tasks this
week, so I schedule them for sometime this week, so I do a couple of C-c
C-s. Note that I do not use DEADLINE, as I schedule the tasks so that
they will be done before the deadline. If I now look at my Org-Agenda I
see the following:

ALL CURRENTLY OPEN TODO ITEMS:
  desktop-project:TODO Call Trainer
  desktop-project:TODO Setup training room
  desktop-project:TODO prepare desktop machines
  work:           TODO Write Article
Monday    10 April 2006
  desktop-project:Scheduled:  TODO Call Trainer
Tuesday   11 April 2006
  desktop-project:Scheduled:  TODO prepare desktop machines
  work:Scheduled:  TODO Write Article
Wednesday 12 April 2006
  desktop-project:Scheduled:  TODO Setup training room
Thursday  13 April 2006
Friday    14 April 2006
Saturday  15 April 2006
Sunday    16 April 2006

Now in the week overview I can see that I also plan to write an article
on Tuesday. This will leave me no time to prepare the desktop machines
so I reschedule this task to Wednesday by S-right on the task.

As soon as I've called the trainer I press `t' on the "Call Trainer"
Task and this marks the task as DONE.

So far everything is fine. But there are a couple of questions:

     1. What is the use case of TIMESTAMP? I seem to only have a use for
        SCHEDULED, so marking them as "Scheduled:" in the Org-Agenda
        Week mode is superfluous for me. What do other people use it
        for?
     2. I would like tasks that are scheduled to no longer show up as
        "CURRENTLY OPEN TODO ITEMS". For me open items are items that
        have not been scheduled yet and that I need to schedule.
     3. The sorting of items within a day is a mystery to me. I would
        like to sort them by state (TODO, DONE) and priority. Sorting by
        priority seems to work for the CURRENTLY OPEN TODO ITEMS but not
        for a specific day. I modified the to '(time-up priority-down),
        but it still sorts by category for the days. I tried to debug
        this but did not find my way around the code
        ((org-finalize-agenda-entries).
     4. When doing some mucking around the code should I use org-mode
        from Emacs CVS or the one from Carstens Website?

Thanks
-- 
Christian Egli, Senior Consultant
Novell (Schweiz) AG, Leutschenbachstrasse 41, 8050 Zürich
Tel. +41 43 299 75 46 direct, Tel. +41 43 299 78 00, Fax: +41 43 299 75 01