Re: Re: Documentation wishlist items

[tycho garen <garen@tychoish.com>]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 12:32:02PM -0400, Matthew Lundin wrote:
> 
> As a point of comparison, I divide my files according to area of
> responsibility (household.org, health.org, family.org, writing.org,
> etc.) so that I can quickly review what I need to do in each area. When
> I'm done with an item, I archive it and it is nicely deposited in the
> appropriate archive file. If a project within one of these files becomes
> quite big, I create a new file for it. I almost never set CATEGORY,
> because all my appointments are already organized by category (i.e.,
> file name).

I didn't know there was a category option. I've been using org mode
pretty seriously for the last 9 months or so. I work pretty much like
Matt, but the details differ as does, I think, my thought process, so
I'll share, just because....

I have two general files codex.org and data.org. I've been naming my
general organization file codex for years, so this is a personal
holdover. Data, is my clipping/reference folder (describe here:
<http://www.tychoish.com/2009/09/fact-files/>) and contains various
reference material and citation information for casual things that I
want to be able to capture and reuse later.

The remaining files are either "sphere" files, so I have a file for
each client/employer/work project, I have a "writing" file to manage
my blogging and wiki projects. These files and the trees inside of
them, tend to address ongoing projects and fairly well defined
projects. The outline tends to describe process rather than project. 

And then, I have a number of project I have files for specific
projects, creative writing projects, specific research projects,
larger scope things which are the kinds of things that I need to work
on for a while, but eventually finish. These files tend to describe
projects rather than processes, and contain notes and a great deal of
text, but aren't, on the whole "todo lists" as they are outlines that
happen also to support my todo list. 

I've always found that org-mode works the best for me when I think of
it more as an outline and data storage tool that happens to generate
todo-lists if there's something actionable around.

> I wouldn't worry about custom commands until you need them. Just type
> type C-c a t or C-c a T "TODO" and you'll get a "clean" list of all your
> todos.

I don't really use custom commands either. I'd recommend playing
around with tags and filtering agendas by tags, and then building on
that as you need to. There is also some crazy-awesome stuff around
using agendas generated from specific files (I think.) but I've also
never touched that. 

In any case, I have the following two key bindings set up to do what
Matt suggested above. 

      (global-set-key (kbd "C-c o a") 'org-agenda-list)
      (global-set-key (kbd "C-c o t") 'org-todo-list)

Cheers, 
sam

-- 
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garen@tychoish.com
http://www.tychoish.com/
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"don't get it right, get it written" -- james thurber