[emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: Newbie to planner.el and GTD

[Joseph Kiniry]

Hi Sacha and Matiyam,

On 22 Sep, 2005, at 16:20, Matiyam wrote:

> I was wondering how does people manage to implement their GTD  
> systems with planner.el . I have read about people using it, and  
> asking for detailed features for planner, but i haven't understood  
> yet the general way of how they use it.

My basic strategy is to collect tasks into groups and use planner- 
trunk to build categorised summaries.  I have a ToDo task that tracks  
miscellaneous tasks and a ToDone task where I occasionally move old  
closed tasks to keep ToDo shorter than a page or two.

To get a top-level view of all my work I use the ToDo task that lists  
all top-level projects in the Notes section, has (currently hand- 
built) calendars of the current, previous, and next months day pages,  
and links to previous completed and archived work.

I have a top-level task for each research project I lead or  
participate in, each piece of software I work on/with, each student I  
work with, each course I teach, etc.

I have begun recently (after several years of planner use) to  
aggressively use planner-trunk and planner-rank to organise tasks and  
rank their (currently only deadline-driven) importance.  My trunks  
mirror the above top-level task structure.  Examples of my trunks  
include:  "System Issues", "Personal Stuff", "My Postgrad Students",   
"Other Students", "My Collaborators", "Projects and Grants", "My  
Courses", "My Software", "Current Conferences", "My Publications",  
"Emacs Stuff", and "UCD and CSI"

Once I get comfortable with the current meta-HEAD I mentioned in my  
last email I'll likely write a few functions that help uber-users  
like me.  Besides a few little bugs I'd like to fix, I want to be  
able to generate calendar tables for weekly/monthly/yearly indices,  
track tasks across multiple days (i.e. not *move* an in-progress task  
from yesterday to today, but *copy* it), and more.  I'll be filing  
feature requests and bug reports on these issues at the Gna site in  
the coming days.

On 23 Sep, 2005, at 4:26, Sacha Chua wrote:

> Yup! planner-multi is great for that. Punctuation might behave
> weirdly, so I just use plain text. In fact, I'd probably use "home"
> and "work" instead of "PlanAtHome" and "PlanAtWork". Easier to type.
> =)

One thing about planner-multi that I do not understand is whether or  
not a day page should be a link when a task is "multi-ed".  It seems  
like I should only do a cross-reference from a task page, not a day  
page.

E.g., I'm seeing multi-linking like this:
#A1  _ Install Mono. {{Deadline: 2005.09.22}} ([[2005.09.23]]  
[[DaraghHurley]] [[JosephKiniry]] [[SystemIssues]])
on the page 2005.09.23.  This is not what I expected.

> It's like Gmail. Search, don't sort.

I have been experimenting with incorporating my planner/muse/wiki  
pages into my remem.el config.  Certainly using Spotlight helps as  
well.  But I have to say, I prefer to organise and not just leave  
everything flat, as a recent post queried about.  I find that GMail's  
"starred" and "labeled" message organisation quite poor for my uses,  
but then again, I have nearly twenty years of archived email to  
contend with.

Joe
---
Joseph Kiniry
School of Computer Science and Informatics
UCD Dublin
http://secure.ucd.ie/
http://srg.cs.ucd.ie/