Building an Org-mode Workflow: Scheduling and Deadlines

by Jeff Bradberry

As I mentioned at the end of part 2, I want to schedule things I need to do on the calendar. So, this week I explored the deadlines and scheduling features.

Usage

There are two types of these timestamps that you can give to your agenda items — schedules and deadlines. Schedules are for events that happen at a particular time, or for when you want to set aside time to work on something particular. Deadlines are exactly what they sound like — a date and/or time something is due by. Both of these seem to behave nearly identically, and you can apply either type or both at the same time to an item.

In order to apply one of these timestamps to an item, use C-c C-s for a schedule, or C-c C-d for a deadline. This will open up a little calendar frame, and will request input in the mini-buffer.

Org-mode schedule input calendar frame and mini-buffer

This prompt is fairly intelligent about what date and time specifications it will take.

When complete, the result will show up as an all-caps keyword immediately under the headline. It must be the next line, with no other lines between it and …

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Building an Org-mode Workflow: Multiple Files and Archiving

by Jeff Bradberry

As I mentioned at the end of part 1, I quickly began to feel the need to break things up into multiple files to make things more manageable. So, this week I explored the refile and archiving features.

Usage

To begin with I wanted to break up my items into categories, one category per file. After some waffling, the categories I settled upon for work were:

  • devel.org: Every item that is going to involve me personally writing code.
  • reviews.org: Coding work owned by other developers, that I need to review or pair with them on.
  • watching.org: Items that I want to keep an eye on, but that aren't yet ready to be worked on or prioritized
  • professional.org: Professional development, giving talks, mentoring, or other things of that nature.
  • other.org: Procedural things that don't comfortably fit in any of the other categories, e.g. talking to IT about problems with one of my accounts.

While I could have just cut and pasted items from my original todo.org file into their respective new files, I wanted something a bit more streamlined. It seemed like the org-refile command (C-c C-w …

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Building an Org-mode Workflow: Basic TODOs

by Jeff Bradberry

I've been thinking recently that I need to adopt a task management system. As a long-time Emacs user, it should be natural for me to also be a user of Org-mode, an Emacs mode for outlining, note-taking, task management, and more. Building a system around an add-on of a program I already have open every day is a major plus and ought to encourage me to keep up with it. It will also be not too far different from the simple ad-hoc text files that I have been using, but with the addition of some programmed functionality that will improve my ability to quickly take an action and then move on without having to think about it too much.

I'm starting here with a fairly small workflow that does the bare minimum of what I need, then I will incrementally build up new pieces (and write a blog post about each as I go) as I discover new things that I want to be able to do.

Usage

For this first phase, I threw everything together into a single file, called simply todo.org. But since I need to configure autodetection of org …

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