Hi all,
I just had an awesome conversation with Sacha about more effective
daily/weekly reviewing with org-mode :-) One of the things we talked
about was quantifying the number of tasks (TODO keywords) in any given
state, as a means of becoming more aware of your progress over time.
I have had some success in the past using the "measure what you want
to manage maxim"[1], and wanted to start applying this to my horribly
massive TODO.org file.
Back in 2008, Carsten very generously implemented the
`org-map-entries' API function at my request[2] in order to facilitate
this kind of measurement, and I'm somewhat ashamed to say that I've
only just started to take advantage of it:
(defun org-count-matches (search)
"Count the number of matches from the given tag search in the
current buffer, respecting any scope restriction."
(interactive "sMatch: ")
(length (org-map-entries t search)))
(defun org-dblock-write:count (params)
"Write a table showing the number of occurrences of each of the
specified keywords and tag searches. Example usage:
#+BEGIN:dynamic block
#+BEGIN: count :keywords (\"NEXT\" \"DONE\") :searches (\"@phone\"
\"@home\")
| NEXT | 522 |
| DONE | 69 |
| @phone | 77 |
| @home | 182 |
#+END:
"
(let ((keywords (plist-get params :keywords))
(searches (plist-get params :searches))
(format "| %-10s | %3d |\n"))
(insert
(concat
(mapconcat (lambda (keyword)
(format format keyword (org-count-matches
(concat "/" keyword))))
keywords "")
(mapconcat (lambda (search)
(format format search (org-count-matches search)))
searches "")))
(backward-delete-char 1)))
Sacha deserves a lot of credit for reminding me how easy it would be
to do this :-)
I suppose the next step would be to automate appending counts to a CSV
file or transmitting them to some kind of graphing service like
https://tempo-db.com/ (or preferably some free alternative like
quantifiedawesome ;-) via a REST API.
[1] http://blog.adamspiers.org/2011/05/15/email-nirvana/
[2] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2008-06/msg00208.html
