On 03/08/06, Jason F. McBrayer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I thought I'd ask to see how other people who are using org for Getting Things Done are handling projects and their relationship to Next Actions.
Thanks for bringing up this topic. You're definitely not alone with this problem, and I'd also like to know how others use org-mode for GTD stuff. I have a headline "* projects" with individual projects as second-level headlines, sorted (manually and approximately) from the most-important to the least important. To mark "next action" items I just use the TODO keyword. (Alternatively you can define a special NEXTACTION keyword or tag.) If I need to see the global list of my nextaction items I use one of the following commands: org-show-todo-tree (C-c C-v), org-tags-sparse-tree (C-c \), org-agenda. A bit of self-publicity here: I find context-menus of org-mouse.el useful for invoking these commands. Allen recommends keeping all your info as a series of various lists, but the advantage of org-mode is that some of those lists (such as the list of current nextaction items) can be autogenerated every time it's needed and not kept anywhere explicitly. Apart from the "*projects" headline, I also have a "*todo" headline, where I put all the todo items which are not clearly assignable to a specific project (or when I simply don't have the time for finding the appropriate project to put them under). Once every while, I go through the "*todo" hierachy and move some items into the appropriate projects. Sometimes groups of entries in the "*todo" hierarchy evolve to the point of becoming a separate project by themselves. This might look like a mess, but actually it allows me to spend more time doing things than organizing them. Actually, I was lying a bit: I don't have one "*projects" headlines, but several of them: "*research activities", "*research projects", "*other projects", all sorted from most-current to least-current. I recommend having separate project lists only if you have a clear-cut distinction between them. I also periodically move all projects further than 10-15 places from the top of each list to one common list "* one day / maybe". Piotr _______________________________________________ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
