Using Org-Agenda for Work

This is a work-in-progress as I’m still refining an org-agenda centric workflow. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

The key problem I think this system should solve is 1) trust that something wasn’t lost or forgotten 2) what to do next. Everything else is nice to have.

You can’t get everything into org-mode. There will always be some incompatibility like getting your calendar synced using GCal. If you don’t accept that, you’ll never actually use it.

The default org-agenda has too much stuff going on if you have 100s of items. I realized I need multiple views of the same things to keep focus. One for the day and another for a fortnight. I look at the day view the most because it has mercifully few items. I look at the fortnight view to think ahead and plan.

Having separate org files is a bit cumbersome. It’s best to always use org-agenda to interface with tasks. Otherwise, there is a lot of manual file opening and searching.

Including goals at the top of the agenda to help focus my attention on what matters. I wrote a small function to inline macros in the buffer so I can see things like how many days are left to hit the goal.

Links to this note

• Steven Wolfram - Seeking the Productive Life - Literary Notes

  I read about Steven Wolfram’s personal infrastructure. He develops his approach to just about everything using the tools that he built. I’m guessing this approach works great for building Wolfram as a giant feedback loop but not directly transferable to others.

• Personal Infrastructure

  It’s useful to think about the underlying utilities that go into running one’s life and business with the same rigor used to build something significant. Afterall, the things we rely on every day can have an outsized impact on our own performance so why not treat it that way?

• My Tag Vocabulary

  I don’t use tags as a way of querying topics. Instead, I use a use a small set of tags (FILETAGS in org-mode) to drive functionality for task management and notes.

• Ways to Use AI With Emacs

  I want to better utilize AI tools in my day-to-day work. I suspect there is much more I can be doing and using Emacs as building material to make it work for me.