[emacs-wiki-discuss] planner-cyclic

[John S J Anderson]

  I'm trying to start using planner (and emacs-wiki, etc) for my
  planning. It seems like it should fit fairly well with what I've
  been doing with pen'n'paper. Naturally, I'm finding a few spots
  where things don't work exactly as I want them to. I'll try to keep
  the questions down to a mild flood. 8^)=

  One of the things I do (hopefully, "did") in my pen'n'paper set up
  was a sheet of daily tasks -- things that I need to do or try to do
  every day, like take some medications, work out, etc. It seems like
  'planner-cyclic' is the Right Thing for this.

  Here's my planner config:

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; PREREQS
(require 'planner)
(require 'planner-bbdb)
(require 'planner-cyclic)
(require 'planner-diary)
(require 'planner-gnus)
(require 'planner-id)

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; HOOKS
(planner-install-extra-task-keybindings)
(planner-calendar-insinuate)
(planner-diary-insinuate)
(planner-gnus-insinuate)

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;; OPTIONS
(planner-option-customized 'planner-directory            "~/doc/plans")
(planner-option-customized 'planner-publishing-directory "~/html/wiki")
(setq
 planner-carry-tasks-forward t
 planner-cyclic-diary-file   "~/.diary-cyclic"
 planner-cyclic-diary-nag nil)

  and here is ~/.diary-cyclic:

*/*/* #A0 _ Take morning pills
*/*/* #A0 _ Take evening pills
*/*/* #A0 _ Work out: __ minute level _ ___ = ___ mi ; ___ cal (WorkOut)
*/*/* #B0 _ Write diary
*/*/* #C0 _ Zaurus sync

  At first, everything appeared to be working just like I wanted it --
  I get those tasks in every "day" page. But since these tasks are
  daily, if I forget to do one, I don't want it to carry over. I
  thought that's what setting planner-cyclic-diary-nag to nil was
  supposed to do, but it appears that undone tasks are getting carried
  over -- maybe because of planner-carry-tasks-forward being t? If
  anybody could shed light on this, I'd be grateful.

  One other thing I'd like to have is the ability to have a mix of
  cyclic tasks, some that carry over automatically and some that
  don't. Is there any way to accomplish that?

  Is there any way to have a cyclic task only Monday through Friday
  without spelling out each day in the diary-cyclic file?

  FWIW, I've come up with ways I could kludge around most of these
  problems, but they all seem to involve creating some tasks I don't
  want and marking them as done. I'd like to avoid that, because one
  of my long-term aspirations is to write some scripts that crawl day
  pages and generate stats on how often I do or don't complete these
  cyclic tasks.

thanks for any help,
john.
-- 
"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve
change amid order." - Alfred North Whitehead