Re: Organizing by time or by subject and an idea

[John Hendy <jw.hendy@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 3:00 AM, Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
> Max Mikhanosha <max@openchat.com> writes:
>
>> At Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:04:51 -0600,
>> John Hendy wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> Generally I think the way to tackle this is to take advantage that you
>> are working with plain text and not with Word document, and use
>> standard Emacs/Unix tools for working with text.
>
> Agreed!
>

Thanks to both of you for input!

>> Some ideas:
>>
>> Before updating each project, cut-n-paste it into the new
>> revision.. Org mode makes it easy to cut-n-paste trees, for myself
>> duplicating a headline is simply pressing Y then P over a folded
>> headline (viper/vimpulse user)
>
> Is it not easier to simply make use of any of the revision control
> systems (git, mercurial, svn, even RCS) that are out there?  You can
> easily tag a particular revision based on milestones and then see diffs
> between the current content and any previous version.
>
> In terms of the original questions, I use a combination of hierarchical
> structure that is filled in as a project develops, with
> revision control to allow me to see progress, together with a log based
> recording of activities (e.g. meetings, deliverables delivered, issues
> raised).  That is, I mix both of the approaches mentioned by John in his
> initial email.
>

This is intriguing. I don't suppose you have a sample file of sorts?
Specifically, I'm interested in how you mix 'n match
hierarchical/topical vs. time-based organization. I really struggle
with this and my purely time based stuff is *definitely* not the way
to go in my opinion, as I have tons of related things in separate
trees with time stamps, which makes finding some little tidbit silly
since I'm looking through different dates for it.

Also, I'm a super git newb. The furthest I've gotten to is setting up
a repo for sharing stuff between work and home, for example, and
simply doing `git pull` from each location when I want to work on
something and then `git push` when I'm done. I'm assuming I could set
up some sort of cron job to `git commit; git push` each day/week or
something? And then learn more git commands to show progress?

Is there a way to spit git timeline based output into separate file revisions?

Sorry if this is getting too off-track from org. I should probably
look into the power of git on my own...


> The key, as John has already stated, is to record everything!  With
> emacs, I can usually pull out what I want *if* the information was
> recorded in the first place.
>
> Finally, tags can be very useful for quick searching as well.

I still need to figure out a better tag system as well. Currently, I
just have a project acronym under each main header:

-----
* Tracking
Odds and ends tasks

* Project 1      :proj1:
Stuff for project 1

* Project 2     :proj2:
Stuff for project 2

* References     :ref:
Misc things I need to refer back to now and then (project reporting IDs, etc.)
-----

That's quasi helpful, but not really... Do you tag by type of data
stored? Project/task type/name?



Thanks again,
John

>
> --
> : Eric S Fraga (GnuPG: 0xC89193D8FFFCF67D) in Emacs 24.0.90.1
> : using Org-mode version 7.8.03 (release_7.8.03.192.g32af)
>