“Fuzzy” times (“evening”, “morning”, “night”…)

“Fuzzy” times (“evening”, “morning”, “night”…)

[Leo Gaspard]

Hello,

In the process of migrating all my self-organization to org-mode, I
noticed there is something that cannot currently be encoded in
timestamps: fuzzy times, where an appointment is made for “Dec 4, Tue,
evening” but with the hours not yet fixed.

Currently my way of handling this has been to mark the tasks with time
spans approx. correct and add a comment to fix them.

However, I think it may be a good idea to allow eg. this kind of
timestamps:
        <2018-02-04 Tue evening>
That would be handled as though it was eg. <2018-02-04 Tue 18:00-22:00>
(which would be configurable), so that it would be both semantically
correct (the time is still fuzzy) and correctly displayed (eg. on an
agenda)

To be perfectly honest, my ulterior motive here is to auto-generate
tasks “Decide of an exact time for [task]” a few days before the
timestamp. However, I haven't investigated yet whether that'd actually
be doable and I'm still pretty new to the lisp/emacs/org-mode
ecosystems, so this may be completely impossible.

What do you think about this idea? Is there a better way to do what I'm
trying to do with current tools?

Cheers,
Leo

Re: “Fuzzy” times (“evening”, “morning”, “night”…)

[Ken Mankoff]

On 2018-12-08 at 09:47 -0800, Leo Gaspard <orgmode@leo.gaspard.io> wrote:
> However, I think it may be a good idea to allow eg. this kind of
> timestamps:
>         <2018-02-04 Tue evening> That would be handled as though it
> was eg. <2018-02-04 Tue 18:00-22:00> (which would be configurable), so
> that it would be both semantically correct (the time is still fuzzy)
> and correctly displayed (eg. on an agenda)
> [...]
> What do you think about this idea? Is there a better way to do what
> I'm trying to do with current tools?


I think this would be a neat feature. But as a first pass which can work immediately, what about using one of the multiple text expansion packages that are Org-agnostic to achieve this: Yasnippets or abbrev mode, for example?

This doesn't maintain the "semantics (time still fuzzy)", but does let you define and enter time ranges in a simpler way.

  -k.

Re: “Fuzzy” times (“evening”, “morning”, “night”…)

[Leo Gaspard]

Ken Mankoff <mankoff@gmail.com> writes:
> On 2018-12-08 at 09:47 -0800, Leo Gaspard <orgmode@leo.gaspard.io> wrote:
>> However, I think it may be a good idea to allow eg. this kind of
>> timestamps:
>>         <2018-02-04 Tue evening> That would be handled as though it
>> was eg. <2018-02-04 Tue 18:00-22:00> (which would be configurable), so
>> that it would be both semantically correct (the time is still fuzzy)
>> and correctly displayed (eg. on an agenda)
>> [...]
>> What do you think about this idea? Is there a better way to do what
>> I'm trying to do with current tools?
>
>
> I think this would be a neat feature. But as a first pass which can work immediately, what about using one of the multiple text expansion packages that are Org-agnostic to achieve this: Yasnippets or abbrev mode, for example?
>
> This doesn't maintain the "semantics (time still fuzzy)", but does let you define and enter time ranges in a simpler way.

Hmm… I guess some abbreviation or command could add the fuzzy time and
add a comment to indicate that the time is fuzzy should work as a
temporary workaround indeed, thank you for the idea :)

Re: “Fuzzy” times (“evening”, “morning”, “night”…)

[Richard Lawrence]

Hi Leo,

Leo Gaspard <orgmode@leo.gaspard.io> writes:

> In the process of migrating all my self-organization to org-mode, I
> noticed there is something that cannot currently be encoded in
> timestamps: fuzzy times, where an appointment is made for “Dec 4, Tue,
> evening” but with the hours not yet fixed.
> ...
> To be perfectly honest, my ulterior motive here is to auto-generate
> tasks “Decide of an exact time for [task]” a few days before the
> timestamp. However, I haven't investigated yet whether that'd actually
> be doable and I'm still pretty new to the lisp/emacs/org-mode
> ecosystems, so this may be completely impossible.
>
> What do you think about this idea? Is there a better way to do what I'm
> trying to do with current tools?

What about just adding a tag (:evening:, :morning:, etc.) to represent a
fuzzy time, with a plain date stamp, like <2018-12-04>?

That would allow you to easily create a custom agenda view containing
just entries with fuzzy times (if they have a timestamp with just a
date, you can even filter for those that are coming up in the next
couple of days).  Then when it's convenient, you can look at this agenda
view and schedule things that are still fuzzy more precisely.

Hope that helps!

-- 
Best,
Richard

Re: “Fuzzy” times (“evening”, “morning”, “night”…)

[Leo Gaspard]

Hi Richard,

Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu> writes:
> What about just adding a tag (:evening:, :morning:, etc.) to represent a
> fuzzy time, with a plain date stamp, like <2018-12-04>?
>
> That would allow you to easily create a custom agenda view containing
> just entries with fuzzy times (if they have a timestamp with just a
> date, you can even filter for those that are coming up in the next
> couple of days).  Then when it's convenient, you can look at this agenda
> view and schedule things that are still fuzzy more precisely.

This sounds like a good idea, thanks! Especially combined with Ken
Mankoff's, so that the event still is shown in the overall agenda at an
approximately correct hour so I don't schedule two things at the same
(fuzzy) time :)

With your two ideas it should make a quite good workaround, thank you!

Cheers,
  Leo