[emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: Summary of unscheduled tasks

[Jody Klymak]

Hi Andrew,

address@hidden (Andrew J. Korty) writes:

> Is there a good way to search project pages for unscheduled tasks
> and display them conveniently?  When I do M-x plan at the start of
> the day and see a nice blank page because I finished all my tasks
> the previous day (ha!), I need a way to pick what new tasks to
> tackle.

Not a solution, but some philosophy.

I "schedule" all my tasks.  By which, I mean that they are queued.
When a task shows up on my page one day I muse about whether I should
do it now, or shuffle it into the future.  

Appointments and such I handle with diary.  

I found the idea of assigning tasks an exact time or day to be not
very useful, but perhaps your workflow is quite different from mine.  

What I have been thinking of, and is perhaps now hackable with Sacha's
task database, is actual queues of tasks.  i.e. in Getting things
Done, you have a project and you write out the next task (however
small) that needs to be done to start the project.  At the same time
you may write the next 10 steps.  This gets a little awkward in planner
however, because you ahve to keep scheduling and rescheduling the
tasks.  Not terrible - I finish a task, follow the link, and
reschedule the next task - but awkward.

What might be cool would be to simply have a list of tasks on a
project, and if you finish one, the next one (or two, or three) show
up in the day page.  You can always get an overview by looking at the
project page.

Syntax could be something like:

Project: Rewrite foo paper

#A0  _ research foobar {{Q}} {{Tasks:230}} 
#A0  _ make plot {{Q}} {{Tasks:231}} 
#A0  _ rewrite paragraph reviewer tore me apart for {{Q}} {{Tasks:232}} 

On the daily page you would just get:
#A0  _ research foobar {{Q}} {{Tasks:230}} (RewriteFooPaper) 

Completing the task would give:
#A0  _ make plot {{Q}} {{Tasks:231}} (RewriteFooPaper) 

Anyhow, just an idea that might make Planner more GTD oriented.  I
could even sacrifice the A's and B's, since I never use them.

Cheers,  Jody

-- 
Jody Klymak      http://opg1.ucsd.edu/~jklymak/
mailto:address@hidden