[emacs-wiki-discuss] Suggestions for using Planner to manage teams? (Re: Hopefully minor enhancements to PlannerMode)

[Sacha Chua]

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(Pardon the long quotes. Suggestions follow, but I want other people
to have enough context.)

Hi Keith,

> I've started using PlannerMode to organize my own tasks and those of
> the small software development team manage.  So far it is going really
> well.  I'm impressed with PlannerMode's flexibility.  

Thanks for trying out Planner! I'm looking forward to tweaking it to
fit your particular way of working, and that of your team. ^_^

I have some ideas on how to do what you have in mind, but might not
have time until this weekend. A number of people on the mailing list
use planner not just for their personal tasks but also for other
people's data and they might be able to share some workarounds with
you. For example, John Sullivan regularly exports task data from his
planner file for his boss, who doesn't use Planner. (John: I don't
suppose we could get him to use it? <impish grin>) Andrew J. Korty
has code for fine-grained access control.

> 1) I have planner-carry-tasks-forward set to 3.  I keep a relatively
>    large set of in-progress and scheduled for this day tasks because I
>    am keeping track of my team's activities too.  As a result, I make
>    a set of second-level outline headings for "my personal tasks", "my
>    work tasks", "employee x tasks", "employee y tasks", etc.
>
>    Right now, when they are carried forward, they get stuck in a big
>    blob at the beginning of the tasks section even though my
>    planner-day-page-template has the subheadings in it.  This would be
>    okay except that I have different "categories" (the A, B, C stuff)
>    set, and these get resorted so that tasks from different sections
>    get mixed up.
>
>    What I would like is that, if the tasks are under a particular
>    outline heading, and that heading exists in the new page, move them
>    under the same heading there.  If it doesn't exist, move it under
>    the top level Tasks heading.  From looking at the code, this would
>    seem to need to be done in planner-copy-or-move-region, but I'm not
>    sure how to get access to the current outline heading tree and make
>    sure things get copied to the right place.  I'm hoping there would
>    be some easy way to get at the headings recursively so it would
>    work with anything from the single top-level heading all the way
>    down through insanely nested setups.

A quick workaround for your first suggestion might be a custom sorting
function that sorts by status and then by task description, or vice
versa. That'll give you some kind of order while we figure out how to
carry forward tasks organized in an outline. (Good support for
hierarchical tasks will make other people happy, too.)

> 2) Have an option where I can make the task lines for completed tasks
>    invisible, including the newline.  Ideally, this would be done
>    interactively with a keystroke that toggles it on and off.  The
>    reason for this is I keep the task list for each member of my group
>    in a separate plan file for that person.  I need an easy way dump
>    out the list of tasks current and pending tasks.  For the purposes
>    of communicating with my team members, it is better not to have all
>    the completed stuff included, but I would like to keep the history
>    for reporting purposes, etc.  I can of course edit that stuff out
>    manually, but I'd like a solution that is more automatic.

Ahhh, this isn't an overlay thing, because invisible text is still
there (although hidden).

This sounds like something grep can do:

    grep -e '^#[ABC][0-9]* \+[^XC]' *

You can use grep to filter the list according to team members as well.

--
Sacha Chua <address@hidden> - open source geekette
http://sacha.free.net.ph/ - PGP Key ID: 0xE7FDF77C
interests: emacs, gnu/linux, personal information management, CS ed
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