Recently I’ve taken interest in making myself more productive, and at least so far it’s going well. I personally attribute part of my current productivity to a new “shut up and get back to work” mentality, and partly to a new (to me) organization system.
The problem I’ve had is that every single organization app is broken in some way. The only truly flexible system uses paper and pen, and I don’t really want to deal with that.
The solution appears to be org-files. Think of them as a close cousin to Markdown, but for organization instead of HTML. The systems that use org-files support basically any kind of work flow imaginable because the storage mechanism is just text, so in the worst case scenario you can always just edit the file manually.
Org-files are originally from the Emacs plugin org-mode, but there are now org-file readers for Vim, iPhone, and Android.
Example File.
Okay Ashton, What the Hell is That?
Let’s break this down bit by bit. Any line starting with #+ is used to tell the org-mode reader something. In this case it lets us know the last time we synced this to our mobile device, and the possible TODO states that an item can be in. It’s not unusual to see formatting directives at the top of the file to control color, indentation, and similar settings. A lot of settings can either be set globally, or on a per-file basis.
Next we have the individual headings. Each heading starts with a number of asterisks. The number of asterisks indicates the level. So ** Wish List. is a child of * Butler. Most editors allow you to fold headings to show or hide their children, for convenience.
Each heading can optionally have a TODO state, which is displayed in front of the heading title.. The default is one of blank, TODO, IN-PROGRESS, and DONE. A simple keystroke in most editors cycles from one state to the next. It’s also possible to support multiple paths that a project can flow through. I personally use the default along with REFERENCE and ABANDONED, which allows for me to easily filter for abandoned projects, along with notes that aren’t actionable yet.
Org-mode supports 3 different kinds of time tracking and scheduling. Each heading can have up to one deadline entry, one scheduled entry, and multiple clock entries. Deadlines are for when an item should be finished, and scheduled is for when a project should be started. Clocks are for recording the amount of time used for an item. You can see an example of both the deadline and clock under the “Better formatting.” header. Org-mode also supports a very flexible type of repeat scheduling.
With any good organization system you’ll need the ability to tag and filter items. Org provides two ways to do this, properties and tags. Tags are generally shared across multiple entries, with values like “work” and “home”. They are displayed on the far right of the tagged line, such as “:projects:” on the Butler line above. You can tag a line with as many tags as you want.
Unlike tags, properties are composed of keys and values, many of which are unique to a specific entry. If you use any kind of syncing system, each item will get an ID property used to enforce uniqueness. A lot of systems will also respect the LOCATION property if you sync to a system that understands this, such as iCal.
And finally you can have notes and text underneath each entry. Most org-mode readers understand free text, unordered lists (- or +), numbered lists, and check boxes (- [ ] and - [X]). Many of these can be easily manipulated with simple keyboard macros, such as the check boxes.
As you can see, org-mode basically provides a super set of all the organizational features available. It’s up to you how you wish to nest these, mark them due, and prioritize. That’s why I love it, I’m not locked into one particular layout that may or may not fit me, instead I can slowly evolve it as my systems mature. Expect more posts in the future about Emacs specific configuration settings to make org-mode easier to use.