> On May 20, 2025, at 8:19 PM, Kristoffer Balintona <krisbalint...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Hi org community,
>
> How have users of the org and Emacs community set up org-agenda and
> org-capture with their Emacs email configuration? In the years I've used
> notmuch and org-agenda, I've mostly relied on good email hygiene to keep
> my inboxes from overflowing with irrelevant or unimportant emails.
> Still, I haven't found a way not to use my email inboxes themselves to
> keep track of tasks to a degree. Ideally, separate my inbox from my task
> management, delegating org-agenda for that task.
>
> My main problem with trying to use org-agenda for all tasks created from
> emails is that the state and relevance of those emails may change
> without the todos tied to them changing (unless I update it myself). In
> other words, although capturing emails as todos (e.g. create a todo
> which has an org link pointing to a given email) is easy enough, email
> threads develop in a way that makes todos tied to that thread outdated.
> The result is todos which are no longer necessary, todos scheduled for
> dates that have already shifted, and so on.
>
> I suppose this inquiry is chiefly directed at those who work on projects
> involving team members or clients.
>
> I hope that explanation communicates my difficulties sufficiently. I
> thought I'd ask the org community in case anyone has found a workflow
> they're happy with.
>
> --
> In gratitude,
> Kristoffer
>
My system uses more than Org mode, but mainly because I did not start with Org
mode on a Mac. The task management I used before Org mode was OmniFocus. What
it taught me is if you add too many attachments to your tasks/projects then the
OmniFocus would get slow to sync. What people recommended was that I should
have a reference store and link the items in the tasks.
So when I process my inboxes, Slack, Teams, text messages, etc...I will store
them in my reference store that will have groups/folders to represent
categories of reference or projects. A project for me is anything that requires
more than one simple task.
I then put that project in Org mode with a link to the project group in the
reference store and under that project will be a TODO for the next step.I will
keep notes here too and link to the responses/requests I make to progress on
items. As new emails come in they will be filed in that project group and not
necessarily have a link to a TODO.
This works great for those projects where you don't get a response for a while,
because when you do go back to it, you can view all the relevant emails and
notes in one spot.
In my case I picked DEVONthink before I discovered Emacs and Org mode. But you
could mimic what I described without it. The power of DEVONthink for me is that
it runs on the Apple ecosystem and syncs between the Mac, ipad, and iphone. The
data remains local and just encrypted chucks are stored in a cloud provider of
some choices to sync. Your data remains yours, but the real power is that a
DEVONthink URI is assigned to each item/group and this can be used in Org mode
to quickly access items. The same link to an email will open that email on any
device that DEVONthink is running on. For that to work, I save all emails of
importance as eml files and delete them from the mail system. Apple Mail and
Outlook can open an eml file and reply/forward as if it was still in your
mailbox. Emacs mail solutions may work the same, but because of my work email
they are not supported clients.
Mark
