filtering the weekly agenda

filtering the weekly agenda

[George Pearson]

I have been using org mode to great effect for a couple of months now
but there is one thing I have not been able to figure out how to do -
filtering what is shown in the weekly agenda.

Naturally, when I'm DOING the tasks, I need to see everything scheduled
for the day.  My problem is when I am SCHEDULING tasks for the week.
The weekly agenda shows me way more than I need to see when scheduling.

My specific problem arises because every day I have a whole bunch of 
recurring
tasks, each typically 10-20 minutes of effort.  After these, I generally
have four hours per day available for tasks related to my big projects.
Unfortunately, the recurring tasks all appear in the weekly agenda,
making it a nuisance to find the days which are still available for
scheduling the big project tasks.  But I have not been able to figure
out how to suppress the recurring task clutter in the weekly agenda view.

I can see several possible approaches to filtering out the recurring
tasks (if such filtering is even possible in the weekly agenda):
1. somehow use the fact that the task has a repeater
2. use the category - right now the tasks are all in a "Recurring"
category
3. mark each with a "recurring" tag and use that
4. put the recurring in a different org file (I currently use just
one org file)

By the way - when scheduling, I use a view of my org file in one emacs
frame and the weekly agenda (in column view, so I can see the "efforts")
in a second frame.

Any advice appreciated!

Re: filtering the weekly agenda

[Manish]

  On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 7:38 PM, George Pearson wrote:
  > I have been using org mode to great effect for a couple of months now
  > but there is one thing I have not been able to figure out how to do -
  > filtering what is shown in the weekly agenda.
  >
  > Naturally, when I'm DOING the tasks, I need to see everything scheduled
  > for the day.  My problem is when I am SCHEDULING tasks for the week.
  > The weekly agenda shows me way more than I need to see when scheduling.
  >
  > My specific problem arises because every day I have a whole bunch of
  > recurring
  > tasks, each typically 10-20 minutes of effort.  After these, I generally
  > have four hours per day available for tasks related to my big projects.
  > Unfortunately, the recurring tasks all appear in the weekly agenda,
  > making it a nuisance to find the days which are still available for
  > scheduling the big project tasks.  But I have not been able to figure
  > out how to suppress the recurring task clutter in the weekly agenda view.
  >
  > I can see several possible approaches to filtering out the recurring
  > tasks (if such filtering is even possible in the weekly agenda):
  > 1. somehow use the fact that the task has a repeater
  > 2. use the category - right now the tasks are all in a "Recurring"
  > category
  > 3. mark each with a "recurring" tag and use that
  > 4. put the recurring in a different org file (I currently use just
  > one org file)
  >
  > By the way - when scheduling, I use a view of my org file in one emacs
  > frame and the weekly agenda (in column view, so I can see the "efforts")
  > in a second frame.

Since you already have efforts defined for your tasks, you could
consider adding a block to your agenda for tasks that have "Effort>x"
where x is the effort threshold.

-- Manish

Re: filtering the weekly agenda

[George Pearson]

On 15 Oct 2008 at 9:52, Manish wrote:

> Since you already have efforts defined for your tasks, you could
> consider adding a block to your agenda for tasks that have "Effort>x"
> where x is the effort threshold.

That could be another filtering option, like those I listed, but some
of my project tasks are short so those would be problematic.

My impression of the block agenda is that it creates its own display,
rather than allowing one to create a filtered weekly agenda.  Have I got
this wrong?

By the way, in the org mode manual, under "Custom agenda views",
we have a section entitled "10.3.3 Matching tags and properties".  
However that section only describes matching tags, NOT properties.

Re: filtering the weekly agenda

[George Pearson]

OK, I now have a way to do this.

I searched this list again with different search terms and found a posting 
that I had not seen before.  This gave me the idea of using a second org
file, into which I would put my recurring tasks.

I've now done this, and after customizing org-global-properties (for 
"effort") and org-columns-default-format (to show "effort"), all seems
to be working as I wanted.  (I had previously used in-file definitions
of these, but that did not work across two org files.)

Re: filtering the weekly agenda

[Carsten Dominik]

On Oct 15, 2008, at 8:49 PM, George Pearson wrote:

> OK, I now have a way to do this.
>
> I searched this list again with different search terms and found a  
> posting
> that I had not seen before.  This gave me the idea of using a second  
> org
> file, into which I would put my recurring tasks.
>
> I've now done this, and after customizing org-global-properties (for
> "effort") and org-columns-default-format (to show "effort"), all seems
> to be working as I wanted.  (I had previously used in-file definitions
> of these, but that did not work across two org files.)

Hi George,

using a separate file is certainly a good idea.  You could also define  
a regexp skip condition, searching for a regular expression matching  
repeater dates like "\\+[0-9]+[dwmy]>".
See Appendix B4 for more details on skipping conditions.

HTH

- Carsten

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