Re: [emacs-wiki-discuss] Assigning tasks to multiple projects/pages

[Berkan Eskikaya]

At Mon, 29 Nov 2004 11:05:38 +0000, James Clarke <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Is it possible to assign tasks (and possibly notes) to multiple
> projects/pages?

I would like to second this. I think of my notes pages as different domains
of intellect and interest, and of tasks as activities/events in these
domains. Each domain constitutes a particular context, and when the domains
are completely or nearly-completely separable/independent, a task/activity
has a meaning/relevance in only a single domain. This mode is well
supported by the current planner.  

But as these conceptual domains/contexts start to relate to each other,
activities acquire multiple meanings/roles. James's example of reading a
particular text provides a very good example [but by no means the only
one]. An article or a book is a multi-dimensional entity containing various
arguments with implications in different contexts. Most [actually almost
all] of the time, it is therefore relevant in multiple domains i.e., on
multiple pages. I'd like to be able to create a task [like
"locate/download/review/read/etc XYZ"] and assign the same single task to
multiple pages where it is relevant.  

There are cases where one can get around this by fine-graining the tasks to
generate a set [like "read chapter 1 of XYZ" and "read chapter 5 of XYZ"]
in order to put on multiple pages, but more then often I've found this
unsatisfactory [other people may have different preferences of course].

Furthermore, treating one's own notes as texts that can have
meaning/relevance in multiple contexts, the natural extension to the above
is to have the ability to assign notes too to multiple pages. 

On the implementation side of this, every time I thought about these
issues, I've found myself imagining a single repository of tasks and notes,
in front of which different planner pages constitute different views [of
different task and notes aggregates]. I'm not sure this [or anything with a
separate repository element] is the right way to go -- I really value the
simplicity of the current framework. 

Nevertheless, if there were a separate repository, I can imagine having
planner files containing just UIDs to tasks and notes in the repository,
which upon opening the file get dynamically expanded to the content they
point to. Editing the content in the buffer will transparently update the
content in the repository and thereby also on every other page that
contains a link to the same content. So, we retain the current human
interface to the planner but things happen a bit differently in the
background. 

I have come across an emacs mode which supports dynamic regions in buffers
like this but I cannot remember which. 

Cheers,

Berkan