'Double-entry' journals

'Double-entry' journals

[John Hendy]

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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:

- I use a modified TiddlyWIki and create daily journal entries like this:
--- Create tiddler (page) with the title being the day's date
--- Using the PartTiddlerPlugin, I surround notes for each unique project
with <part projectName>notes about project </part>
--- I have separate pages for each project where I can extract the notes in
between the respective tags using some TiddlyWiki scripts such that I look
for all journals tagged with projectX, print the title of that journal (the
date), and then print under it the notes between the <part> tags
--- In this way, I have both a chronological set of journal entries as well
as a running chronological set of entries for any specific project

- I was using features from Phil Hawksworth's Team Tasks (
http://getteamtasks.com/) TiddlyWiki features, but didn't really like
that... so recently I have been using Tracks (http://www.getontracks.org/),
a ruby on rails app.
--- The TiddlyWIki was just clumsy with respect to tracking the tasks. The
ability to link to a 'task' (which was really just a tiddly page) was great,
but the viewing was horrible...
--- Tracks has been pretty good, but I have to have my desktop running the
server so that I can log in from my laptop when I'm away at a meeting. Since
I can't seem to make it work with my database stored on my company network
share, I'm out of luck for keeping a central database for when my desktop is
down... also, when I need to reboot into Win (I usually am running linux)
for CAD work, my task server is offline which is never good.

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) vs. many (proj1.org, proj2.org...). Is this not the
'org-way' (is it easier to keep a file per project)?
--- 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?

- 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.


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.

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Re: 'Double-entry' journals

[Jan Böcker]

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

Re: 'Double-entry' journals

[Haroldo Stenger]

hi ,

2010/3/19 Jan Böcker <jan.boecker@jboecker.de>:
> 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.


Combining these two posibilities , I wondered myself whether it would
we useful to have a org-mode tree-like "view" of the agenda view , and
other reports. Something like a text generator that bases its output
on agenda output , and renders or re-renders output based on agenda
view. If someone comments on it , I'd be wishful to start hacking it ,
up to my knowledge, which is lispy to some extend (a common-lisp
background, and little elisp yet.)

best regards ,
haroldo

Re: 'Double-entry' journals

[John Hendy]

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I'm still sorting through how I will use this. I have settled (for now) on
project specific .org files as I just can't bring myself to have everything
in one file alone, even if that is what will eventually be what I do.

I'm fine with this, but it is crucial for me to be able to export to html or
pdf for printing purposes. So... take two project files to start as an
example: 1.org and 2.org

My current structure for each project looks like this (I'm in R&D):

* Background
Description of the project, it's status when it came to us, where it's
going, aims/goals, etc.

* Journals
Notes and todos all go here in this format (one per day)
**<Timestamp day1>
What I did that day
**<Timestamp day2>

* Ideas
Random ideas that perhaps don't fit in the journal entry... I very well may
ditch this section as I need my ideas exported and I'm sure to export the
journals so I may just include this in the journals as the day goes on.

So... 1.org and 2. org will be like this. The problem is that when I export
I want the output to look like this:

*<Timestamp day1>
**Activity for project 1 on day 1 here
**Activity for project2 on day 1 here
*<Timestamp day2>
**Activity for project 1 on day 2 here
**Activity for project2 on day 2 here

This way, I export chronologically such that all activity on any day covers
all the projects I touched that day. Then I print them and tape them in a
notebook for Intellectual Property purposes and have my printouts witnessed.
This has currently worked great via TiddlyWiki since I create one journal
per day with all projects. There has to be a way to do this in org-mode. I
think it's just a simple agenda view export, right?

In the end, it's not the true 'double entry' that is the issue, as agenda is
basically doing that. This is what my TiddlyWiki is doing -- it's not
actually allowing me to edit the same information in two places, it just
creates a view in a journal and the same text in a project. Agenda seems
like it's doing the same thing. It's hunting for text based on tags or
timestamps or properties and then recreating all those that match in a
different view. I should be able to create a view of one day's activities,
print it, then pull up the next day's, print it, etc.


John


On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 5:29 PM, Haroldo Stenger
<haroldo.stenger@gmail.com>wrote:

> hi ,
>
> 2010/3/19 Jan Böcker <jan.boecker@jboecker.de>:
> > 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.
>
>
> Combining these two posibilities , I wondered myself whether it would
> we useful to have a org-mode tree-like "view" of the agenda view , and
> other reports. Something like a text generator that bases its output
> on agenda output , and renders or re-renders output based on agenda
> view. If someone comments on it , I'd be wishful to start hacking it ,
> up to my knowledge, which is lispy to some extend (a common-lisp
> background, and little elisp yet.)
>
> best regards ,
> haroldo
>

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Re: 'Double-entry' journals

[Jan Böcker]

> So... 1.org <http://1.org> and 2. org will be like this. The problem is
> that when I export I want the output to look like this:
> 
> *<Timestamp day1>
> **Activity for project 1 on day 1 here
> **Activity for project2 on day 1 here
> *<Timestamp day2>
> **Activity for project 1 on day 2 here
> **Activity for project2 on day 2 here

Try inserting active timestamps into your log entries with <C-c .>

A headline that has one or more active timestamps will appear in the
agenda on those days.

For more information, see: (info "(org) Timestamps")

HTH, Jan