Re: GTD, Projects, and Next Actions in org-mode

[Carsten Dominik <dominik@science.uva.nl>]

Hi Jason,

thanks for starting this discussion.

It seems to me that you are mainly concerned about dynamically 
producing a list of projects.  Have you thought about using a special 
tag for the top line of all project, something like :PROJECT:?

You can then get a list of all projects by making a tags search on
:PROJECT:, for example through a custom search like

(setq org-agenda-custom-commands
       '(("p" tags "+PROJECT")))

This will get you the list with `C-c a p'.

You may run into problems with this approach if you have set 
org-tags-match-list-sublevels to a non-nil value, because then, due to 
tag inheritance, every headline *inside* each project will also show up 
in the resulting list.  To work around this, you may define your own 
special command like this:

(defun my-org-project-list ()
   "Get me a list of projects."
   (interactive)
   (let ((org-tags-match-list-sublevels nil))
     (org-tags-view nil "+PROJECT")))

Hope this helps.

- Carsten

On Aug 3, 2006, at 22:36, Jason F. McBrayer wrote:

>
> I thought I'd ask to see how other people who are using org for
> Getting Things Done are handling projects and their relationship to
> Next Actions.  I've tried out several approaches, and while I can rule
> out a few as no good, there are some with enough plusses and minuses
> to keep me from being really happy with any of them.
>
> My first go was to have a top-level category for projects, with a
> headline for each project under that.  This worked for keeping track
> of my list of projects, but it didn't give me any way to tell what
> project a Next Action was associated with.
>
> My next attempt was to mix together projects and next actions, with
> next actions coming hierarchically under the project they were
> associated with.  Projects have a tag unique to that project, but
> distinct from the tags I am using for contexts (contexts start with @,
> projects with nothing).  This works, but the only way to get a list of
> projects is to either look manually through the file, or get the list
> of tags and ignore the ones that are contexts.
>
> I've tried two others:  one is to make PROJECT an org-todo-keyword.
> This makes it very easy to get a list of projects, with the negative
> side effect that projects can show up in context lists if they are
> tagged with a context so that their Next Actions can inherit it (e.g.,
> home improvements are all tagged @Home).  This would work fine if I
> didn't use tag inheritance, or was conscientious about not putting
> contexts in projects.  The other thing I've tried is to make "Project"
> a tag.  This obviously works only if one is not using tag
> inheritance --- if you're not, then it's easy to get a list of
> projects, but if you are, you'll get all your next actions, too.
>
> What are other people doing to keep track of their projects?  Is
> having projects listable all that important?
>
> -- 
> +-----------------------------------------------------------+
> | Jason F. McBrayer                    jmcbray@carcosa.net  |
> | A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, |
> | even though we do not love it.            -- Dogen        |
>
>
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>

--
Carsten Dominik
Sterrenkundig Instituut "Anton Pannekoek"
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Kruislaan 403
NL-1098SJ Amsterdam
phone: +31 20 525 7477