#Emacs

If you write it down, it’s capital-S Science. At least, that’s what one of my grade-school teachers told me (faced with my “samples” collection sourced from field and river near my house).

Science isn’t a lot more complicated than that, but professional academia definitely seems to be. When I decided I wanted to make a go of serious Astro again, it unceremoniously dunked me into a sudden deluge of journal papers, voluminous and near-inscrutable. It’s, well… intimidating… and a seemingly, strange rarefied, almost impenetrable world.

A lot changed since my 2019 GTD and CRM flow post . After trying lots of new software in 2022, I’ve come back full circle to org-mode. But the experiments with new things were super valuable. I caged and culled new ideas and ways of doing stuff from other software and feel it’s made my GTD setup and system fundamentally stronger and helps me execute better. Here’s how it all works.

Starting a new role is always a litmus test for any GTD system you have. What may have worked in old roles may not work in new roles (though the holy grail is a system that is adaptable anywhere). While my emacs org-mode system has served me very well from a task (and life) management perspective, it has its shortcomings.

With my new role, my workplace is even more Google docs driven than my last workplace, and vastly more collaborative and global (with the added challenge of everything being remote in these covid times). One of the shortcomings with emacs for me previously was sharing work, and I have to admit the idea of a more web-integrated, cloud syncing, browser-based workflow (as long as it will also work offline) is attractive. Since it’s getting close to that time of year when I review what’s working and what’s not (and my new boss nearly fainted when I sent him a plain text formatted table from emacs org-mode of my onboarding plan), I decided to look at the good and bad in my workflow and start some GTD experimenting over the last weekend.

Besides habits as a form of process-based productivity, ruthless prioritization, and limiting of work in progress (or scheduling) doing proper weekly reviews and planning has been the basis of the main GTD gains I’ve noticed the last 6 months.

I’ve started experimenting with a 3 daily slot system and a 7+1 bucket review method every week that has been unexpectedly more effective, and felt it might help others who struggle with similar problems (too much to do, a constant onslaught of new things to prioritize and do, and never enough time to do it). Plus, it involved a bit of code to help with visibility and tracking and a siple system that is portable across systems (or paper) so felt post-worthy.

This was my attempt to remix org-mode with my Taskpaper flow to try to get all the benefits of org-mode for note taking, tracking and being date-aware.

While I still owe Taskpaper a huge debt for making GTD effective for me, I’ve talked before about how it not being date-aware, having repeating tasks, and lack of customization, as well as it not being great for tracking over time, led me to try org-mode.

Emacs org-mode’s focus on plaintext organizing files is surprisingly powerful. However, archiving files to keep thing lean and fast becomes important as your corpus grows. To fit with my GTD style, I took an alternative approach to org-mode’s native archiving and automated it.

My GTD style heavily revolves around a daily org-journal file that collects notes and TODO items into a rational structure for reference and tasks tagged by various semantic grpups, critical to moving forward my 100+ person team. Separate from project files, habits, or my repeating tasks org-journal daily files end up being the meat of moving forward and tracking things across the large organization.