Re: [emacs-wiki-discuss] RE: 3-pages instead of day pages

[Trent Buck]

"Raymond Zeitler" <address@hidden> writes:

> Trent Buck writes:
>
>> Using day pages just wasn't working for me.  I never scheduled anything in
>> advance, so all the open tasks just sat on the present day page.  Each day,
>> any separation of the tasks into groups would be lost as all the unfinished
>> tasks were brought forward.  And the fact that a new file was being created
>> each day and about forty lines being deleted from one file and added to
>> another made using version control to manage the archive everything a real
>> pain in the arse.  Lastly, the huge numbers of day pages felt messy and the
>> average of of one completed item per page was depressing.  [snip]
>
> Me, too, referring to your introduction.
>
> Lately, I've resorted to writing tasks down on a scrap of paper.  I don't
> even have time to enter tasks into Planner.
>
> My job has become increasingly service oriented.  I'm supposed to be
> designing product and developing processes and procedures.  But the amount
> of support I need to provide for legacy product (there's no production
> engineering here) means I get people coming in my office (or phone calls or
> email) to ask about a potential 13 year's worth of stuff I've produced.
> Even the interruptions that interrupt the interruptions are interrupted!  Is
> this company crazy or what?  I'd walk, but I have a house and family to
> feed.  (The house eats paint and caulk....)

You need to set up a rule with colleagues about when you can be disturbed.
Something like 

        Unless it is major-critical-urgent-lives-depend-on-it, you will not bug
        me except in the last fifteen minutes of an odd hour (e.g. 10:45 to
        11:00, 12:45 to 13:00).  It takes fifteen minutes to get my flow back
        and I'm getting interrupted every ten minutes, so I can't get *any*
        work done unless you guys schedule your interruptions a little.

The same goes for email.  When an email comes in, you don't have to act on it
immediately.  Try to minimize the number of "context switches" you do, because
they all take up resources without actually achieving anything.

> Sorry about that.  What it boils down to is that I've got lots of projects on
> the backburner and even some partly in a mixing bowl and several with
> bookmarks in the cookbooks (to stretch the analogy.)  I'm afraid that if I
> axed these from the day pages, I'd forget about them.  The idea of a page
> devoted to Future work is wonderful.  And having a page of Closed stuff can
> serve as a morale boost for those days when I feel hopeless.

Indeed.  I feel that having an OpenTask list separate from the NewTask list
(and making the former the default page for M-x plan) encourages me to finish
what I've started before I leap ahead to new stuff.

-- 
Trent Buck, Student Errant