another GTD question from dto

another GTD question from dto

[David O'Toole]

I've been in my new "simple GTD" system for about a week, and it feels
very comfortable. Thanks again to Carsten and to the org-mode
community.

Now I see what was wrong with my previous uses of org-mode. I never
used any keywords other than TODO and DONE. This didn't give enough
information, so it meant that every task I might possibly ever do had
a TODO item. Because of the absurd number of TODO's I never used the
agenda feature much, and therefore didn't schedule many things; I
relied on my cell-phone for scheduling appointments, and never set
deadlines in my personal coding projects.

Now I am scheduling more things, and using the agenda views
regularly. 

But I am still having one problem. Right now I have a section in my
One Big Orgfile that looks like this: 

> * Books
> ** TODO Read "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
> *** DONE Find out about Wittgenstein's notation
> *** NEXT Chapter 5
> *** TODO Chapter 6
> *** TODO Chapter 7
> *** TODO Review entire book
> *** MAYBE [[http://s22318.tsbvi.edu/mathproject/appB-sec1.asp][Spoken mathematics]]
> ** TODO Read "The Analysis of Mind"
> *** NEXT Chapter 1 

This gives in the agenda:

 dto:              Scheduled:  NEXT Chapter 5
 dto:              Scheduled:  NEXT Chapter 1

Without any indication which book the chapters are from.  Can I fix
this with properties or tags or categories or something?

-- 
David O'Toole 
dto@gnu.org
http://dto.freeshell.org/notebook/

Re: another GTD question from dto

[Bernt Hansen]

David O'Toole <dto@gnu.org> writes:

> I've been in my new "simple GTD" system for about a week, and it feels
> very comfortable. Thanks again to Carsten and to the org-mode
> community.
>
> Now I see what was wrong with my previous uses of org-mode. I never
> used any keywords other than TODO and DONE. This didn't give enough
> information, so it meant that every task I might possibly ever do had
> a TODO item. Because of the absurd number of TODO's I never used the
> agenda feature much, and therefore didn't schedule many things; I
> relied on my cell-phone for scheduling appointments, and never set
> deadlines in my personal coding projects.
>
> Now I am scheduling more things, and using the agenda views
> regularly. 
>
> But I am still having one problem. Right now I have a section in my
> One Big Orgfile that looks like this: 
>
>> * Books
>> ** TODO Read "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
>> *** DONE Find out about Wittgenstein's notation
>> *** NEXT Chapter 5
>> *** TODO Chapter 6
>> *** TODO Chapter 7
>> *** TODO Review entire book
>> *** MAYBE [[http://s22318.tsbvi.edu/mathproject/appB-sec1.asp][Spoken mathematics]]
>> ** TODO Read "The Analysis of Mind"
>> *** NEXT Chapter 1 
>
> This gives in the agenda:
>
>  dto:              Scheduled:  NEXT Chapter 5
>  dto:              Scheduled:  NEXT Chapter 1
>
> Without any indication which book the chapters are from.  Can I fix
> this with properties or tags or categories or something?

I'm less than a week into my shiny new GTD setup.

I don't normally schedule tasks that don't need to be scheduled anymore.
I spend more time "doing stuff" than rescheduling things.  I have a
PROJECT and PROJDONE task which I use only for project headlines - and
the PROJECT task defines what is a project.  I schedule some of the
important PROJECT tasks (not their subtasks) just to keep them on my
radar in the daily agenda view.

My NEXT tag view for @home is @home/NEXT|PROJECT so my view is something
like this:

  todo:       .PROJECT Learn Ruby on Rails - Agile Development on Rails Depot Application tutorial
  todo:       ...NEXT Chapter 6                                  :sub60:

which shows the book title.  You can also use follow mode in the agenda
if you reveal the parent headings with org-show-hierarchy-above t.

I don't know of a way to see it directly in the agenda if you only
display the NEXT task.

HTH,
Bernt

Re: another GTD question from dto

[Bastien]

David O'Toole <dto@gnu.org> writes:

> Without any indication which book the chapters are from.  Can I fix
> this with properties or tags or categories or something?

,----
| * Books
| ** TODO Read "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"
|   :PROPERTIES:
|   :CATEGORY: TLP
|   :END:
| 
| *** DONE Find out about Wittgenstein's notation
| *** NEXT Chapter 5
| *** TODO Chapter 6
| *** TODO Chapter 7
| *** TODO Review entire book
| *** MAYBE [[...][Spoken mathematics]]
| ** TODO Read "The Analysis of Mind"
|   :PROPERTIES:
|   :CATEGORY: TAoM
|   :END:
| 
| *** NEXT Chapter 1 
`----

Will give in the agenda:

  TLP:              Scheduled:  NEXT Chapter 5
 TAoM:              Scheduled:  NEXT Chapter 1

It defines a category for each book.

Caveat: when I first discover the power of categories (and other ways to
attach interesting information to a headline) I started to use it a lot.
Because I thought I would finally find something useful to do with these
informations.  But sometimes it's just too much, and the hope for some
useful-thing-to-do-in-a-near-future leads to irrelevant hassle...

So in this case, I would simply put "* Chapter 5 of the Tractatus" in
the headline. But this might be entirely personal.

BTW, the Tractatus is also on my TODO list :)

-- 
Bastien

Re: another GTD question from dto

[Jason F. McBrayer]

David O'Toole <dto@gnu.org> writes:

> This gives in the agenda:
>
>  dto:              Scheduled:  NEXT Chapter 5
>  dto:              Scheduled:  NEXT Chapter 1
>
> Without any indication which book the chapters are from.  Can I fix
> this with properties or tags or categories or something?

I always try to put enough information in a task headline to make it
unambiguous.  This is more "GTD", I think, but it's also a bit more
manual. 

-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Jason F. McBrayer                    jmcbray@carcosa.net  |
| If someone conquers a thousand times a thousand others in |
| battle, and someone else conquers himself, the latter one |
| is the greatest of all conquerors.  --- The Dhammapada    |