Re: How to deal with small projects which are often changing their status/ person

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

M <Elwood151@web.de> writes:

> I hope it is clear what I mean, there are a lot of small steps and each time
> creating a new task takes much time and I have to copy the name of the
> "project" again and again...
>
> Maybe it would be better to add all the notes about the progress as notes in
> the Logbook and change the Heading of the task each time, but that also
> seems strange to me...

This is exactly what I do, and it works great for me. If you enable
state-change logging for the TODO keywords you use most, you can keep a
fully annotated and time-stamped history of how the TODO has progressed.
I make the heading something generic (ie, "Article XYZ") and note what
has to be done next in the logbook.

I like the idea of a single TODO for a single "thing", even if that
thing has multiple steps. I often don't know what those steps are going
to be (arguments over email, waiting for someone to get back from
vacation, blocking on another task, etc) so I need flexibility.

In practice, most of my complex tasks start at TODO, bounce back and
forth between NEXT and WAITING, and finally end up at DONE. Changes
between WAITING and NEXT are logged, so I end up with a LOGBOOK full of
neatly stamped changes, each one with a description (plus links to
emails and all) of progress. This "feels right" to me.

My main custom agenda view has a block each for WAITING and NEXT
headings.

> Would there be a way to make the "children" inherit automatically a text
> from the project name, e. g.

Wouldn't this be best taken care of with tags and tag inheritance? I
also put colleagues' names in tags, when something requires their
participation, which makes it easy get a view of "stuff John should be
doing".

The problem with the logbook approach is that logbook entries are fairly
limited beasts (you can't tag them, for instance), and I'm probably
already on the verge of abusing them. Next on my list would be sorting
agenda items by timestamp of most recent log entry, and also an agenda
hotkey to display the most recent log entry for the TODO under point.

Possibly what I should be considering is a state-change trigger that
actually creates a sub-heading TODO, rather than a logbook entry.

Hope something in there's useful!

Eric