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.