Re: Workflow for planning and scheduling tasks with org mode

[Kristoffer Balintona <krisbalintona@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Dec 21 2024, Ashish Panigrahi wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am fairly new to org and was wondering what are the common workflows that people follow for planning and scheduling with org-mode.
>
> Currently I have one file called agenda.org to which I write a top level header for the week that I'm planning tasks for, followed by the tasks with the TODO keyword in front of the tasks. Still trying to figure out org-agenda as it often seems to fail me (or perhaps I've not understood the exact working behind it) but I often find myself pressing "C-x [" to bring agenda.org to the front of the agenda list, after which I can see my org agenda.

You can find a lot of other workflows for org-agenda throughout online
forums and blog posts. I'll briefly outline the general shape my
"workflow" has currently.

For me, I'm a proponent of having flexibility in a task management
system. That is, I cannot have the system become dysfunctional after
e.g. a day or week of falling behind. In the past, with org-agenda and
other task management apps, I had too rule-based of an approach so if I
didn't do a task the exact day I scheduled it for, then it'd pile up on
the next day, and then that day I wouldn't be able to do both the
backlog of items and the items I scheduled for that day... and so on.

Nowadays I have this: I have one org-agenda view for tasks that have a
deadline or scheduled date for today[1] and that are have the todo
keywords I've designated for "tasks I will do"[2]; then I have another
view for tasks with the "inbox" tag that are "assigned for review." By
"assigned for review" I mean tasks that, using the org-review[3], have a
NEXT_REVIEW property date that is today or in the past.

This second agenda view allows me to create tasks that aren't fixed to a
certain date (because if I do that for all tasks, the tasks for any
given day will be a mix of "have to do" and "can do later") nor a bunch
of tasks without a date (which results in too many tasks visible at
once, making it hard to prioritize).

With these two views, I can always do the following. (1) When I want to
be productive, I open the first view to see the tasks I have to get done
today (because I scheduled them today or their deadline is today) and
the tasks which I've determined should be out of the "inbox," and are
therefore tasks I should consider either resuming or starting. (2) At
the start of the day or when I feel it appropriate, I can see the tasks
which are in my inbox. Those tasks are ones my past self decided my
current or future self should judge: do I do it now (remove inbox tag
and schedule it for today), do it sometime soon (just remove inbox tag),
or defer the decision to my future self (call
org-review-insert-next-review then select a date so I can see this task
again on that date), or don't do it at all (set the todo state to
CANCELED).

The reason this workflow has stuck for me is because if I am
unproductive for a day or two, I don't have a backlog of items: my first
agenda view has only a few scheduled items from previous days and my "do
this stuff soon" tasks are the same. When I go to review my inbox
(second agenda view), I can defer items further if necessary. I can also
move items into the inbox for review on a certain date (using
org-review-insert-next-review) if there's too much on my plate. And
through all this, in my first agenda view, I clearly see which items are
urgent/important to be clearly visible (using deadlines and priorities)

There are of course more details specific to my workflow, like using
org-super-agenda to create the views, my tagging conventions, relying on
filtering the org-agenda, not scheduling too many items, and so on--but
that's the gist of it.

Footnotes:
[1]  Or, with delay cookies, certain items in the future.

[2]  For me, this is just TODO and NEXT.

[3]  https://github.com/brabalan/org-review

-- 
Best,
Kristoffer