Re: [emacs-wiki-discuss] Thinking about planning

[Chris McMahan]

I would love to see a weekly view/planner of some type!!

For the week number, have you looked at the function 
calendar-print-iso-date

Its output includes the week number.
ISO date: Day 5 of week 36 of 2005

- Chris


Sacha Chua writes:
>Hello, everyone!
>
>I haven't posted a planning reflection in a while. I thought I'd think
>out loud again after rereading Covey's _First Things First_ and the
>Merrills' _Life Matters._ This isn't _the_ way to use Planner. In
>fact, I like thinking out loud about my planning style because I love
>getting suggestions and advice from others. (This community is
>amazing!)
>
>Today I experimented with dividing my tasks according to roles.
>(http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/wiki/2005.09.08.php) It's a little
>like planner-trunk.el, but I added the labels manually. This lets me
>make sure I'm doing something useful in the roles I wanted to
>concentrate on. I would like to eventually move to doing weekly
>role-based planning, but I haven't quite figured out a nice way to do
>a week plan.
>
>Here are my thoughts on my planning method so far:
>
>*** Roles
>
>Bunching my tasks according to roles makes it easier for me to
>concentrate and prioritize. You can use planner-trunk to do that
>too, or just rearrange your tasks and add blank lines between them.
>Blank lines don't automatically get carried forward, though.
>
>*** Weekly planning
>
>The main reason I have a paper planner (8.5" x 11": weekly calendar +
>todo list + notes) is have that week-at-a-glance view. I like iCal's
>interface for planning tasks on a weekly basis, but I'm not entirely
>sure how to map that onto Emacs, and I like my daily notes and my
>day-view task list.
>
>So now I'm trying to figure out how to do exactly what was discussed
>on the mailing list a week or two ago: good week planning. I don't
>think I've ever come across an Emacs PIM that made me go aha, yes,
>that's the way to do it, although howm's searching comes close and
>org's outlining can sort of do the trick. Well, so can Planner with
>new plan pages, I suppose.
>
>As I was trying to figure out how to do weekly planning, I realized I
>didn't know a nice, easy Emacs function for finding the current week
>number. Would anyone happen to have that handy? Alternatively, I could
>use something like Week.2005.09.05 to signify the week starting on
>2005.09.05 (depending on calendar-week-start-day).
>
>Maybe I could vertically divide the screen between a week view, with
>tasks indicating my priorities, and a day view that shows the actual
>goods. Then I can use planner-multi to schedule tasks from the week
>view, and page forward and backward on the day view to check my load.
>
>With planner-cyclic and planner-deadline in place, that would actually
>be better than my paper planner. =)
>
>I keep wondering whether we should do what everyone else does and
>store a task once and only once. I don't know how to hack that so that
>it will let me manipulate the tasks as plain text, though. I like
>adding blank lines in the middle of things, or changing the sorting
>order, or doing other weird stuff. So I guess duplicated text works
>better for me.
>
>*** Undated tasks
>
>Undated tasks tend to get forgotten, but the
>sacha/planner-schedule-next-task code I had in my config was a bit
>annoying. When I caught myself unscheduling a task even before
>properly reading it, I turned that off in my config.
>
>I think it's because I need to rearrange the tasks in my plan pages so
>that the important ones come out first. I've already tweaked
>sacha/planner-schedule-next-task to add a new task only when I've
>finished all scheduled tasks on that page for that particular project,
>but it seems that after I finish a sublist of tasks, I feel like
>changing contexts.
>
>Maybe I can make a next-actions function that goes through a list of
>projects and tells me what the next action is. When I have
>unexpectedly free time, I can hit a shortcut to call that function,
>and it will list the most important task (and perhaps the least
>important as well? ;) ) in various pages.
>
>Hey, that would be a low-cost thing to implement. We already have the
>pieces for that...
>
>*** Publishing
>
>One of the side-benefits of publishing your task list is that
>occasionally people will go and do the tasks for you. For example, one
>of my TODOs was to write the speaker at a recent convention. I liked
>his talk and I wanted to learn more about personal coaching. Because
>I've been busy these past few days (my mom's visiting, school's
>starting, etc.), I kept putting it off...
>
>... until I got a note from him saying he searched for his name, found
>my TODO, and decided to write to me. ^_^ Yay!
>
>-- 
>Sacha Chua <address@hidden> - open source geekette
>http://sacha.free.net.ph/ - PGP Key ID: 0xE7FDF77C
>interests: emacs, gnu/linux, personal information management, juggling
>sachac on irc.freenode.net#emacs . YM: sachachua83
>
>
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-- 
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Chris McMahan | address@hidden
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