Re: How you ORGanize yourself? (aka: Why not one file to rule'em all?)

[tycho garen <tychoish@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 12:41:19AM -0500, Marcelo de Moraes Serpa wrote:
> This is a thread to share your org dir (you have one right) file structure.
> The title is because I see many of org users prefer having big monolithic
> files, and I have a slightly different line of thought.

I've blogged about this before, as I think our "systems" change a
bit as we use them and tweak slowly. I'm not a GTD user in the formal
sense, though I think I've learned a lot from the whole GTD "thing."
My setup is as follows: 

- "codex.org" - General file, global inbox, and day to day chores, and
  other notes. Many org-remember templates file here and are later
  cleaned up to other files

- five .org files for fiction projects in various state of
  incompleation.  These include outlines, project management and task
  setting, and other assorted notes. Think Outline++

- data.org, clippings.org, annotations.org, and links.org. These are
  all fed from org-remember and mostly don't have internal
  hierarchy. I think of these files as a database, and I often dump
  the text of articles that I'm interested in reading and reflecting
  on in the long term with citation information so I can be sure that
  I'll have access to them long term. I've written about this on my
  blog as "fact files."

- events.org - schedules and big things that I'm doing. Mostly minimal
  and the way that I make sure that my agenda view can tell me that
  I'm going out of town for something or other. 

- I have org-files for managing website/writing projects, for
  tychoish.com and cyborginstitute.com. These tend to be more
  notes+tasks centered than the other finite project based files for
  fiction things, as these are enduring projects with shorter
  narratives, as it were

- I have technology.org and fiction.org which I must confess I haven't
  really touched in months, but theoretically there for tech-related
  todos (hack emacs to do something new, add a keybinding here) and
  smaller fiction related tasks that don't fit into the bigger
  projects (short stories, new projects that I don't know if I want to
  commit to etc.) 

- I have research.org and employment.org which are both career
  related, and I haven't touched very much in the last year or
  so. Alas. 

- I have an employer specific org file for my current company, which
  allows me to separate out my work tasks into it's own silo without
  affect other tasks, while still being a part of my larger org
  system. 
 
Everything is in one directory which is git controlled. Everything is
agenda-ized. I often just work in org files making outlines and doing
my planning there, but often actionable items come in via
org-remember. I toggle between the "org-todo-list" agenda view and the
org-agenda-list, and use the -todo-list to get a big picture of
everything I'm working on and to create deadlines and schedule tasks,
and then use -agenda-list to work from. Relevant sections of my
config:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c o a l") 'org-agenda-list)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c o a t") 'org-todo-list)

(setq org-agenda-include-all-todo nil)
(setq org-agenda-skip-scheduled-if-done t)
(setq org-agenda-skip-deadline-if-done t)
(setq org-agenda-include-diary t)
(setq org-agenda-columns-add-appointments-to-effort-sum t)
(setq org-agenda-start-on-weekday nil)
(setq org-agenda-default-appointment-duration 60)
(setq org-agenda-mouse-1-follows-link t)
(setq org-agenda-skip-unavailable-files t)
(setq org-agenda-use-time-grid nil)
(setq org-agenda-todo-ignore-deadlines t)
(setq org-agenda-todo-ignore-scheduled t)

I hope this helps....

Cheers,
sam

-- 
tycho(ish) @
garen@tychoish.com
http://www.tychoish.com/
http://www.cyborginstitute.com/
"don't get it right, get it written" -- james thurber