Re: 'Double-entry' journals

["Jan Böcker" <jan.boecker@jboecker.de>]

On 19.03.2010 05:52, John Hendy wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
> I'm quite new to org-mode but am very excited about handling a lot of my
> current notes/task issues. My current/previous setup:
> 
[snip]
> 
> So, enough rambling. I love the idea of org-mode to handle both aspects
> in one place as well as all the other magic it can do (keep in mind I'm
> just learning emacs as well!). Here's the questions:
> - What solution/file structure would be recommended for the above?
> --- Namely, I like the idea of daily journal entries so that I work in
> one file per day (date.org <http://date.org>) vs. many (proj1.org
> <http://proj1.org>, proj2.org...). Is this not the 'org-way' (is it
> easier to keep a file per project)?

Hi John,

If I understand you correctly, you edited the daily pages directly and
generated the project specific ones automatically from that. The normal
Org approach is to go the opposite direction: you edit your project
files directly and use the agenda to view tasks (and notes, if you
include an active timestamp in them or tell the agenda to show inactive
timestamps) by date in daily, weekly or monthly views.

> --- Can I make something (a headline and the notes below it) a
> 'double-entry' item? In other words, if I keep the file MainProject.org
> and tag a bunch of headlines in my journals with MainProject, can I get
> those items to also appear in MainProject.org without having to add them
> in both places?

As far as I know, org does not support this. You could create an agenda
view that displays items tagged with MainProject and put a link to that
agenda view into MainProject.org, but I do not know of a way to directly
include something.


> - Are there any other suggestions for how to do something like this? I'm
> new and open to other better ways. I saw Carsten's presentation (not the
> Google Tech talk one) and am somewhat against the idea of a huge, long
> file. I guess if you can collapse it enough it's fine... but it just
> doesn't feel right. I love my current method of just keeping a journal
> entry per day and letting my TiddlyWiki code automatically update the
> project pages accordingly. Starting with a way to replicate that
> functionality as well as adding in the todos all in one place would hook
> me on org-mode for sure.
> 

I also rejected the idea of one long file until recently, when I
realized that you do not have to navigate that huge file manually.
Nowadays, I have two big org files: projects.org (actionable things) and
reference.org (nonactionable things).

In my day-to-day usage, I do some edits (changing TODO state and tags,
killing an entry) directly from the agenda; for others, I press ENTER or
TAB in the agenda to jump to the entry.
I used to have a separate file for each project, because I liked to only
see and edit one project at a time, and the agenda also displays the
file name before each TODO entry.

However, I learned that you can get the benefits of lots of small files
with one big file, without having to come up with a file name and adding
a new file to org-agenda-files for each project (and ending up with
dozens of open buffers):
To change the text that the agenda displays before an entry, set the
CATEGORY property. To only see and the project you currently care about,
use C-x n s (org-narrow-to-subtree); when you want to see the whole file
again, use C-x n w (widen).


> 
> Best regards,
> John
> 
> P.S. I was not sure what to search for in order to find out if there was
> an implementation for this. I read under the manual about linking and
> did some various searches regarding 'wiki-like' behavior for org-mode
> (as this felt like what I'm perhaps trying to do), but nothing really
> seemed to apply to this; mainly, nothing about having two 'snippets'
> mutually update one another.

The general approach in Org seems to be that every piece of information
is stored in one place, then you use the agenda to slice and dice it
according to your needs.

I guess you could keep one chronological journal file and define an
agenda view for each project, but it should be much easier to keep each
project in a separate subtree (or file), because the chronological
agenda view is already there.


I took a look at my git repository: I have been using org-mode for about
ten months now; the system in its current state is much younger. Try
using org for some time, and experience the ability to customize it to
your needs. It also helped me a lot to read through the whole manual at
least once (without understanding everything), to get a general idea of
what is possible. There is also a lot of information to be found on worg
or in the archives of this mailing list, and of course in the
documentation strings of all those variables.

Hope this helps,
	Jan