Hello, everyone! I haven't posted a planning reflection in a while. I thought I'd think out loud again after rereading Covey's _First Things First_ and the Merrills' _Life Matters._ This isn't _the_ way to use Planner. In fact, I like thinking out loud about my planning style because I love getting suggestions and advice from others. (This community is amazing!)
Today I experimented with dividing my tasks according to roles. (http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/wiki/2005.09.08.php) It's a little like planner-trunk.el, but I added the labels manually. This lets me make sure I'm doing something useful in the roles I wanted to concentrate on. I would like to eventually move to doing weekly role-based planning, but I haven't quite figured out a nice way to do a week plan. Here are my thoughts on my planning method so far: *** Roles Bunching my tasks according to roles makes it easier for me to concentrate and prioritize. You can use planner-trunk to do that too, or just rearrange your tasks and add blank lines between them. Blank lines don't automatically get carried forward, though. *** Weekly planning The main reason I have a paper planner (8.5" x 11": weekly calendar + todo list + notes) is have that week-at-a-glance view. I like iCal's interface for planning tasks on a weekly basis, but I'm not entirely sure how to map that onto Emacs, and I like my daily notes and my day-view task list. So now I'm trying to figure out how to do exactly what was discussed on the mailing list a week or two ago: good week planning. I don't think I've ever come across an Emacs PIM that made me go aha, yes, that's the way to do it, although howm's searching comes close and org's outlining can sort of do the trick. Well, so can Planner with new plan pages, I suppose. As I was trying to figure out how to do weekly planning, I realized I didn't know a nice, easy Emacs function for finding the current week number. Would anyone happen to have that handy? Alternatively, I could use something like Week.2005.09.05 to signify the week starting on 2005.09.05 (depending on calendar-week-start-day). Maybe I could vertically divide the screen between a week view, with tasks indicating my priorities, and a day view that shows the actual goods. Then I can use planner-multi to schedule tasks from the week view, and page forward and backward on the day view to check my load. With planner-cyclic and planner-deadline in place, that would actually be better than my paper planner. =) I keep wondering whether we should do what everyone else does and store a task once and only once. I don't know how to hack that so that it will let me manipulate the tasks as plain text, though. I like adding blank lines in the middle of things, or changing the sorting order, or doing other weird stuff. So I guess duplicated text works better for me. *** Undated tasks Undated tasks tend to get forgotten, but the sacha/planner-schedule-next-task code I had in my config was a bit annoying. When I caught myself unscheduling a task even before properly reading it, I turned that off in my config. I think it's because I need to rearrange the tasks in my plan pages so that the important ones come out first. I've already tweaked sacha/planner-schedule-next-task to add a new task only when I've finished all scheduled tasks on that page for that particular project, but it seems that after I finish a sublist of tasks, I feel like changing contexts. Maybe I can make a next-actions function that goes through a list of projects and tells me what the next action is. When I have unexpectedly free time, I can hit a shortcut to call that function, and it will list the most important task (and perhaps the least important as well? ;) ) in various pages. Hey, that would be a low-cost thing to implement. We already have the pieces for that... *** Publishing One of the side-benefits of publishing your task list is that occasionally people will go and do the tasks for you. For example, one of my TODOs was to write the speaker at a recent convention. I liked his talk and I wanted to learn more about personal coaching. Because I've been busy these past few days (my mom's visiting, school's starting, etc.), I kept putting it off... ... until I got a note from him saying he searched for his name, found my TODO, and decided to write to me. ^_^ Yay! -- Sacha Chua <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - open source geekette http://sacha.free.net.ph/ - PGP Key ID: 0xE7FDF77C interests: emacs, gnu/linux, personal information management, juggling sachac on irc.freenode.net#emacs . YM: sachachua83 _______________________________________________ emacs-wiki-discuss mailing list emacs-wiki-discuss@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-wiki-discuss
