Re: how do scientists use org mode?

[Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>]

GMX Christoph 13 <christoph-13@gmx.net> writes:

> Hi
> this is my first post here and although I am evaluating org mode with
> great interest, I am also asking myself in which way other scientists
> are making use of org mode. It will take a while to get my head around
> how to accomplish certain things in org mode but for the moment I am
> intrigued by *why* one would want to approach the problem of
> organizing one's research with org mode and in which way.
> Are you putting exclusively your todos in, well, your todo file and
> perhaps keep project-related things, such as data and progress, notes,
> ideas etc. somewhere else? Or do you embed your notes and todos within
> their original context, i.e. is org mode your one-stop solution for
> data management? Do you maintain a separate file for every major
> project you are responsible for or involved in or throw everything
> into one or few humungous files and differentiate using hierarchies
> and tags?

I have *everything* in org these days except for my email (gnus for that
so at least I don't have to leave emacs ;-).

I have GTD stuff in a set of org files in a specific directory.  For
research projects, I do pretty much as Tom as already described.

> In the past I have hit some road blocks not so much with other
> softwares but rather concepts such as GTD, which I think is tailored
> to the needs of people outside science, so I would deeply appreciate
> your views and experience.

I am not sure why you believe that GTD is for people outside
science: it's about task management and that is pretty much universal,
IMO.  Whether you follow any particular GTD approach religiously is
another story, of course.  The trick is to pick and choose the bits that
work for you.  For me, being able to have project specific tasks within
a research org file is very helpful.

> If this list is geared towards the proximate aspects of development
> and less towards philosophy of usage, I apologize

Not at all -- they feed on each other so both are just as important.

-- 
: Eric S Fraga (GnuPG: 0xC89193D8FFFCF67D) in Emacs 24.0.92.1
: using Org-mode version 7.8.03 (release_7.8.03.243.g0e7f)