* Re: Use case of TIMESTAMP, SCHEDULED and DEADLINE
2006-04-10 11:21 Use case of TIMESTAMP, SCHEDULED and DEADLINE Christian Egli
2006-04-10 12:46 ` Carsten Dominik
@ 2006-04-10 18:28 ` Austin Frank
2006-04-11 10:30 ` Carsten Dominik
2 siblings, 0 replies; 6+ messages in thread
From: Austin Frank @ 2006-04-10 18:28 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: emacs-orgmode
Christian Egli wrote:
> 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?
Hello! In my previous thread I noted that I want to use org to manage
notes and tasks. This left out an important aspect of the way I have
used org and intend to, one of things that actually pushed me toward the
system in the first place. I also need to track how I'm spending time
on my tasks.
I recently lost ~20 lbs, and the most important tool for affecting that
change was writing down my weight every day and kept a running average
(I used the system described in the Hacker's Diet). Just seeing the
trend was enough to keep me motivated to eat a little bit less each day,
or find a small extra opportunity to be active.
As a graduate student I'm not required to do much in the way of
accounting for how I use my time, as long as certain long-term
milestones are met. This can make it difficult to stay on task during
shorter stretches. Even breaking large tasks into small ones and
documenting my progress on them can sometimes lead to a lot of small
tasks being put off just as long as the large one would have been.
So, just like for weight loss, I want to start keeping a record of my
daily time use. Hopefully, once I have enough data to aggregate and
look at the trends, I'll be able to pinpoint areas where I can improve
and will be able to motivate myself to stay on task longer or return to
my tasks more quickly after distractions.
A guide for beginning grad students in the computer science department
at my university suggests keeping a log file where you record your
accomplishments at 15 minute intervals on days when you're having
trouble being productive. I've tried this, using an external timer and
marking an org file with a time stamp for each entry. I found the
method to be both too frequent and too removed from my current task to
be especially useful.
My intention is to keep an org file (per day? per week? per month?)
where I track my work using timestamp ranges and links. When I start on
a task I'll make a time stamp and link to a resource relevant to the
task (the file I'm editing, the article I'm reading, notes from the
class I'm going to). When I finish a task or change tasks, I'll mark
the end of the time range I spent on that task (and begin a new one if
necessary). In some cases I'll record notes with the entry about what
happened while I worked, to try to pin down things that are especially
effective or especially distracting.
I do think there's something to the notion of making regular progress
reports while you work during stretches where it's hard to stay on task.
In a case where I was following this strategy, I would still start an
entry with a time range and a link to my current work, but I might
include sub-entries marked with timestamps to allow me to keep
finer-grained records of my progress. I intend to write a nag-me elisp
function that prompts for a new entry after a certain amount of time has
elapsed-- hopefully with programmable prompt intervals. I have a hunch
that an exponential function describing the interval between prompts
might be effective: record often early in the task to get myself honed
in, but record less often as time passes and I become more involved with
the work.
I believe that tagging these progress entries with a series of
categorical tags will allow me to aggregate across similar tasks and do
some analysis of how much time I'm spending on different tasks. I'd
like to be able to ask questions like "How much time did I spend last
week on project X?", "How much time did I spend last week on all
research projects?", and "How much time did I spend last week working
productively?". I'm hopeful that the org/tables/calc combination will
serve me well in pursuing this.
Hope that gives you some ideas about some potential uses of timestamps
and time ranges. I'd welcome any comments about the ideas I've
described here, whether people are using similar systems or have
different approaches to the same kind of issue.
Thanks,
/au
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 6+ messages in thread
* Re: Use case of TIMESTAMP, SCHEDULED and DEADLINE
2006-04-10 11:21 Use case of TIMESTAMP, SCHEDULED and DEADLINE Christian Egli
2006-04-10 12:46 ` Carsten Dominik
2006-04-10 18:28 ` Austin Frank
@ 2006-04-11 10:30 ` Carsten Dominik
2006-04-11 13:45 ` Christian Egli
2 siblings, 1 reply; 6+ messages in thread
From: Carsten Dominik @ 2006-04-11 10:30 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Christian Egli; +Cc: emacs-orgmode
On Apr 10, 2006, at 13:21, Christian Egli wrote:
>
> 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?
The *intended* difference (which may have nothing to do with
the way things are being used...) is the following:
TIMESTAMPS are for marking events or appointments. For
example, you can use a range to write down when a certain meeting
will take place, or you can put a timestamp when you you are
supposed to be somewhere, like an date for the movie theater.
Timestamps show up in the agenda only on the specified day,
not before, not after. Just like writing down something in a
paper agenda.
Scheduled items on the other hand stay in the agenda for today
until you mark them DONE. They a like a small child complaining
"Daddy, you promised to play football with me yesterday, you did
not, so I will keep complaining until you do". If you scheduled
something for yesterday and did not make it done, it will be in
your agenda for today until you do. In this way,
scheduled items are very much like deadlines - the only difference
is that deadlines start showing up on your agenda a few days
before they are due. Scheduled items only show up on the
scheduled date. Both stay in the agenda until marked done.
> 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.
Hmmm, yes, I can see how this would be useful, but this is
not how it works now. I'll put this on my list to think about.
> 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).
OK, let me explain sorting, maybe this will make things clearer.
First of all, in your agenda for a day, things are not *sorted*
by category. Things are collected from the different files, so
that means *initially* the items are already in the sequence as
given in org-agenda-files, and therefore presorted by category.
Org then attempts to sort the items, but it does change the
sequence of any two items only if it has a reason to do so, for example
if they have different priorities. However, two TODO entries
from different categories have the same priority, so org-mode
will not exchange them, and categories stay together automatically.
Here is some information about priorities, which is not yet
documented.
A TODO entry has priority 1.
Timestamps and ranges, and diary entries have priority 0.
A deadline has priority 100 on the day it is due. On days before
becoming due the deadline has priority 10-(days to due-date)
A scheduled item has priority 99 on the day it is due. So it is
going to be high in the list, but still below deadlines due today.
Explicitly specified priorities #A, #B, and #C add a value
of 2000, 1000, 0, respectively. Items without explicit priority
are treated as being #B.
So a TODO entry normally has priority 1001. If the same line has a
[#A]
cookie, its the total priority would be 2001.
In the agenda you can check the priority of an item with the "P" key,
by the priority is not updated when you change the date or TODO state
of an item. Refresh the agenda with "r" to make sure the correct
priorities are listed for "P".
If you want to get the TODO entries taken apart by keyword, I guess
I would have to assign different priorities for different TODO
keywords. Or make a special TODO sorting key that could be added
to `org-agenda-sorting-strategy'.
If with these explanations you still come to the conclusion that sorting
does not work, then we have a bug to fix.
- Carsten
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 6+ messages in thread