Re: Novice here: agenda related questions

[Matthew Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org>]

Hi Saurabh,

Saurabh Agrawal <mailsaurabh@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Matt
>
> 1. Your first suggestion is spot on. Thanks.
>
>>> 2. Since I have a number of TODO action items in several projects, I
>>> would like to display only top two of them for each project at a
>>> time in an agenda. Is it somehow possible using some particular
>>> custom agenda view?
>>>
>
> In my second question, what I wanted to ask was is there some setting,
> where I can set number of TODOs to display for a particular CATEGORY?
> or something like that?

Sorry, I missed your second question when I replied to the email. I
handle this scenario by hand -- i.e., I only mark one or two next
actions as active TODOS per project and then switch the following
actions to TODO by hand once the first next actions are completed. (But
you could also mark the first one or two TODOs of a project with the tag
:NEXT: and then use a secondary query to limit your agenda only to items
tagged :NEXT:)

org-stuck-projects really helps here to determine which projects don't
have a next action.

If you want to automate cascading next actions, there is org-depend.el
in the contrib directory of the org distribution that can do what you're
looking for -- i.e., change the state of the next item in a subtree once
the previous item is marked done. Here's a quote from the file:

,----
| ;;
| ;; Triggering
| ;; ----------
| ;;
| ;; 1) If an entry contains a TRIGGER property that contains the string
| ;;    "chain-siblings(KEYWORD)", then switching that entry to DONE does
| ;;    do the following:
| ;;    - The sibling following this entry switched to todo-state KEYWORD.
| ;;    - The sibling also gets a TRIGGER property "chain-sibling(KEYWORD)",
| ;;      property, to make sure that, when *it* is DONE, the chain will
| ;;      continue.
| ;;
| ;; 2) If the TRIGGER property contains any other words like
| ;;    XYZ(KEYWORD), these are treated as entry id's with keywords.  That
| ;;    means, Org-mode will search for an entry with the ID property XYZ
| ;;    and switch that entry to KEYWORD as well.
`----

There are also several discussions of org-depend on the mailing list.

Best,
Matt