Re: advice re organizing todo agenda items

[Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>]

Filippo A. Salustri <salustri@ryerson.ca> wrote:


> Hi,
> I'm hoping someone can offer some advice.
> In my agenda is a todo list.  Let's say there's 10 things in the list.  What
> I'd like to do is rotate the items, i.e.
> 1. I work on the first item for a while.
> 2. When I'm done for now, I'd like to push it down to the bottom of the
> list.
> 3. Work on the next item (which is now at the top).
> 4. Wash, rinse, repeat.
> 
> If the items were all in 1 file, I could just refile an item to push it to
> the bottom of the file or section.
> The problem is that they're not in just 1 file.
> 
> At the moment, I'm subverting effort to fill that role.  By changing the
> effort, I can move things around in the list.  But it's (a) a subversion of
> effort and (b) just generally kludgy.
> 
> Anyone got any ideas?
> 

Priorities perhaps - you can change the priority of an item in the
agenda with + or - and refresh the agenda with `g'. When you are done
with the item for the time being, change its priority back to default or
lower and press `r'. When you are done, you can change the priorities
back to default with a bulk action using the function
org-agenda-priority [fn:1].

You'll probably need to adjust the value of org-agenda-sorting-strategy
so that priorities take precedence.

This won't push the tasks down the stack but it will keep the A task at
the top and the C tasks at the bottom. The ones at default will not
be marked, so they are easy to spot. Is that good enough?

Nick

Footnotes:

[fn:1] Resetting the priorities to default involves marking all the tasks
with priority cookies, pressing `B' to invoke the bulk action, then `f'
for a function, then typing `org-agenda-priority' for the function and
then pressing SPC for each marked task. All of this is much easier to do
than to describe, except for the typing of the function. I don't know if
this is possible already, but if not, consider it a feature request:
instead of typing the name of the function, press the key that is bound
to the function in the agenda (`,' for the case of org-agenda-priority).
It should be possible to find the function bound to the key and invoke it
as if its name was typed. How does that sound?