Hi Rens, Rens Oliemans <ha...@rensoliemans.nl> writes:
> Thank you for sharing this! It seems like reducing the amount of loose TODO > tasks is an important part: > >> * Every week I check the TODO and WAIT tasks that do not appear in my >> calendar. Indeed. In general, the agenda views that I use routinely nudge me to strongly limit the number of items I'm exposed to. - The schedule/deadline view for this week: if I see more than 10 items for today, I'll try to reschedule or update the deadline if I can. - The view of ONGO/NEXT tasks for a project: again, if I see more than 10 items here, I'll probably re-evaluate the tasks and see if I can't refactor things a bit: often several tasks are written as separate tasks, when they really belong together. >> This last step, processing TODO items without SCHEDULED or DEADLINE, is >> particularly important: it took me a long time to realise that my discomfort >> with my Org setup came from not knowing whether I could forget a task. > > I hear the same sentiment throughout this thread by Ihor and Bob, that it's > undesirable to have many TODO items that just lay around for a long time. For me, these TODOs are a "stock", as opposed to a "flow" of activated tasks. They are like notes in that respect: I don't mind having a lot of them. Of course, having a very large "stock" of TODO becomes a problem when reviewing them becomes unmanageable, but that's where priorities come in handy: "TODO [#C]" items that have been here for a very long time are probably things I should just give up on. Perhaps org-review can help here, too: https://github.com/brabalan/org-review > I was wondering how you (and others) would then look at the following > scenario: > I'm working on a project (master's thesis) with a clear scope and a clear (but > large) list of TODOs. Some of these are actionable right now (NEXT?), but many > are actionable only in the future (ie, "Work on presentation"). > > This means that I now have 119 TODO (or WAIT) items without a scheduled date, > which seems antithetical to the workflow you described above. > > I find it challenging to work out a method of consolidating a big project like > this with having few TODOs open. Do you have any thoughts on this? Perhaps the distinction between projects and tasks can be useful? You probably have several subprojects within this big "thesis" project: e.g. writing a paper is probably a project rathan than a simple task. If you define subprojects, it will definitely reduce the stock of TODOs by providing them with a purposeful context. 2 cts, -- Bastien
