org-mode revisited

With the school-leaving exams in June drawing closer, I have little time to write posts. However, having little time means having to manage it better. In this spirit I invested some time in reading about task management and planning - with org-mode, incidentally.
Organizing stuff logically if fun for some - I'm one of them. Also, as GTD (see below) says, it does help to get things 'off your mind'.

As usual, instead of rephrasing information already on the 'net, here are the links you should check out (possibly just skim through for ideas) if I got your attention:

• Getting Things Done (GTD for short) is all the buzz in time/task management. I adapted it somewhat to make it more comfortable for my twisted way of thinking, but it's a great framework.
• A nice writeup on how Charles Cave "uses org-mode to implement GTD". This was the real time-saver for me. And guess what, the site is made with org-mode. How's that for self-documenting?

This whole thing might be strange at first, but give it a try. In the worst case, you've lost half an hour thinking about organizing yourself. In the best case, you've gained a framework and tool for... well, organizing yourself. And that's actually not a small gain at all.

Getting organized in plain text

Intro to Hungarian education

It's been February for three days already, which means only three or four months left until the school-leaving exams (depending on how you count it). That means very little time for blogging - or anything, really. But it also means I have to prepare for the oral exams, preparing lots of notes.

In case the Hungarian education system is foreign to you (he-he, that was a pun, laugh up already), here's what it comes down to. We get a bunch of titles 4-5 months before the exams (about twenty in one subject). Then at the exam we get one of the titles at random and have to talk about that one. That's it - if it was the only title you knew, good for you. If it was the only one you didn't know - well, that sucks.

If you prepare the topic and learn it word for word, it should be perfect (if you prepared it right of course). So that means lots of typing (or hand-writing, but that's naturally out of the question). I did the first ten or so topics with LaTeX - it looked nice, but I lost the source due to a hard-drive crash. And anyway, LaTeX for notes? WTH.

Org-mode to the rescue

Org-mode, supposedly distributed with Emacs (but still see orgmode.org) is written for just this - taking notes and writing lists. Of course it's much more than that. Here are some of the features that come to mind. The org-mode manual details them.

While reading below, keep this in mind: all this is stored in plain old text. No fancy markup. All the functionality comes from structures that likely appear in hand-written notes and some major elisp wizardry.

So an appetizer: org-mode gives you unordered lists and ordered lists. It gives you unlimited depth headings with folding. It gives you tables with - hold tight - spreadsheet-like features according to the manual. I say that should be proper spreadsheets. As a matter of fact, you can use elisp code when computing results - so you could run an Emacs in a cell ;)

You get TODOs with two states by default (TODO and DONE), which can be customized to as many as you like, globally or per file. TODOs can also be prioritized, with three levels be default. Deadlines and scheduled start dates for the TODO tasks. Why set these? 'Cause org-modes integrates with the Emacs calendar. Automatically display how many / what percent of the TODOs under a heading are done. BTW, 'done' means "is in a state that's considered to mean done" - the state itself can be anything from LEARNED to KILLED to CHEESE-BURGER-WITH-SPINACH-SALAD. Also checkboxes as light-weight TODO items. Don't you love ASCII checkboxes?

You can store your stuff in as many files as you want, then place hyperlinks to the files in the appropriate places. Of course you can make links to anything Emacs can open - that means reference PDFs, images, archives, whatever you need. Oh, and websites, of course.
All the files can then be processed together to get an 'agenda', with the TODOs scheduled or deadline'd on the given day/week.

Org-mode also exports org files to HTML, LaTeX (and therefore Postscript and PDF), and iCalendar for timestamped entries. I could be writing this in org-mode and exporting to HTML. I'm not, but I could be - and you'd never know :)

Finally, some links

If you wanna jump right in: a list of tutorials
Org-mode homepage: orgmode.org
Org-mode manual

Have fun!