Re: [emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: Making planner simpler

[Carl Worth]

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 08:37:04 +0900, Sacha Chua wrote:
> I also strongly recommend that newbies (and everyone, really) post
> their thoughts and questions on this mailing list, as planner does
> more than what is officially documented. Perhaps we can eventually put
> together a FAQ...

I have a couple of suggestions for making planner simpler.

I'm a person who "lives" in emacs to a large degree, since most of my
time is spent programming or reading/writing mail (mh-e).

I was very intrigued by the notion of an emacs-wiki, and particular a
mode for managing personal time and tasks, as I've been meaning to find
a way to organize myself better, and I would very much like a very
"emacs" way of doing so.

I spent about a half day playing with planner and didn't get hooked,
(although I still want to be). Here's some of what I ran into. Please
note that there may be ways to do some of the things I wanted, but if so
I didn't find them, so that may point to holes in the documentation.

The first thing I tried using was planner-create-task-from-buffer. This
command asked me for three pieces of information: a task description, a
date, and a page. This feels like two pieces too many. When I think of a
new task I need to do, I want to just type in that task so I don't
forget it. Personally, for the kinds of tasks I want to plan, I almost
never know in advance a date for the task---I intend the planning
process to help me figure out the scheduling. And as for "page", isn't
that what the -from-buffer command is for? If so, why prompt again?

But now I got to see some tasks listed and I really liked the
automatically wiki cross-links between categories of tasks and dated
pages.

Since I wasn't too happy with the prompting of planner-create-task, I
wondered if I could just create new tasks by typing them in in a
matching style to existing tasks. This seems a very natural interface,
(perhaps since I'm already used to structured text entry for wikis).

I entered a new task by manually typing something like:

        #A0  _ Test manual tasks (2004.12.14)

I was happy to see it highlighted just like the other tasks, and the
date link actually took me to the 2004.12.14 buffer. But, alas, there
was no "Test manual tasks" item on that page.

Similarly, there were other parts of planner that just don't fit my
style. The "A0" prioritization, (can't remember what planner calls
these) doesn't help me. I don't think I want the computer to sort a list
for me after I assign prioritization codes. That feels like an
unnecessarily indirect means of sorting. I think I'd rather just see a
small list of related items and directly put them in the order I want. I
can accept that others have different preferences here, but for me the
"A0" field is just noise.

So I think my ideal interface to planner mode is actually very simple. I
would enter tasks directly into a buffer, with some simple structure to
indicate the beginning of a new task, (say an initial sequence of " _
"). Then, I could optionally enter categories or dates in () after a
task, which would make links to dynamically created pages showing tasks
with matching categories/dates.

That sounds to me like something very close to "raw" emacs-wiki along
with good backlinks support. Perhaps planner could provide this simpler
interface, or maybe I should just try to get emacs-wiki alone to give me
what I need.

In the meantime, right now I'm just maintaining a ~/TODO file with a list
of tasks. Then each day as I complete things I move them down in the
file to dated sections. That's doing a fair job of letting me track
things, but I would love more help from the computer in narrowing my
view to related tasks and in publishing the results.

Thanks for taking the time to listen. Hopefully something I've said has
been useful.

-Carl