[Orgmode] Re: Productiviy tools

[Dave Täht]

Daniel Clemente <address@hidden> writes:

> Off-topic.
>
> El dom, sep 13 2009 a les 07:45, Dave Täht va escriure:
>> ;; my personal fav, run every 15 minutes
>>
>> (defun nag-timer () "Nag me when there isn't a clock running"  
>>   (interactive)
>>   (unless (marker-buffer org-clock-marker)
>>     (say "Are you mating now?")))
>>
>
>   I like this very much and have started using it; let's see how
>   annoying it can be.

Well, say is a wrapper around a call to the cepstral speech synth, it
used to talk to espeak. Both are having grave difficulties sending stuff
over ESD to my nokia 770 with the latest pulseaudio in ubuntu 9.04. I
really like using ESD. I can listen to good quality music on that handheld,
AND still have various announcements play over the music. I can wander the
house on headphones and still function. 

I'm about ready to dump pulseaudio and write a wrapper for cepstral to
send stuff directly to esd with no intermediaries, and/or tie cepstral
into espeak properly.

I am not big on visual, pop-up reminders, or things that beep or
bong. You really can (with procmail + ssml) convert the old "You have
mail" Aol thing into "You have mail from John Doe", if you want. 

>   Do you really clock all the time you have Emacs open? That will give
>   very complete statistics about daily computer usage… if only you
>   don't end up clocking everything into a general task „* do some
>   things“.

Not yet, but I'm getting better at it. I had to move more and more of my
life into emacs to be able to do it, and the big piece missing is
tracking web usage. I have really begun to hate the default black on
white display of most web pages, and am considering adopting conqueror
I'd like to have that general task "do some things" be a bit bucket for
a daily:

"You spent X time editing Y file"
"You spent X time in an erc window"
"You spent X time in email" (actually, finer grained would be good)
"You spent X time not on the clock"

Which I could then re-allocate over my current projects, but am very
unsure as to how to go about it. I've seen a few tools that track
Xwindow usage....

>   I have since long thought of more utilities like this, which watch
>   my work habits and help me correct them in the ways I defined
>   beforehand. It would be something like my org-boss and include:

I like to think of the voices I use as virtual secretaries, not
bosses. They work for me, not vice versa. If I ever abstract the
functionalities of the various say scripts enough, I'll end up calling
the package "majel" after Majel Barret and come up with some suitable
backronym.

Majel would gather up stuff overnight and tell me in the morning that
VIPs Bob, Doc, and Joe sent me mail, that the surf is up, and winds
offshore, and yesterday I didn't do a drop of billable work, and tell me
a joke, and tomorrow I have to pay some bills, while I blurrily consumed
coffee...

> - warn when I'm not clocking anything (possibly do this only on work
> hours, not at home) 

Yes, my previous mail here has the start at an attempt to divide up work
and play more than I do currently. Don't want to be nagged 24 hours a day.

> - check that each work day I work the hours I should, no less

Heh, for me, I also need reminders to NOT work MORE hours than I should,
and make time for the fun stuff, like playing music and surfing. I
really have to get the tide schedule into this thing somehow.... 

>- warn when some tasks or deadlines start to seem
> difficult to complete on time: - e.g. if there are still 30 predicted
> hours but the deadline is tomorrow (so you won't be able to do those
> 30 hours) - or if I am being too slow (e.g. if after 1h working at a
> 4h task I am still at 10%. To be on schedule I should have been at
> 25%) 

Related to that I have a backlog of tasks that I would like to bulk
reschedule so I stop seeing them. I have about 25, now, and I'm moving
next week, so I'm just not going to get them done and have to push them
all into the future somehow.

Also related to that would be some sort of ms-project-like load leveler,
where I could see that I had 100 hrs of stuff scheduled for next week
and have an easier way of sorting it out.

Similarly, a bulk estimator to mark a set of tasks and put in estimates
for them all, fast.

(I'm pretty sure I can do this last already. Again, I'm only 2 months
into org-mode, many things, like publishing, remain a mystery. I had an
abortive experience with blorg this afternoon, for example. I liked what
I saw of blorg, didn't realize it had been discontinued, don't want to
run ruby for a blog server, and haven't figured out if org-publish does
enough of what I want)

> - motivate me positively when I complete tasks faster than
> planned - help me find the effort estimates which proved wrong
> (because I spent more time than planned) - warn when I have too many
> scheduled tasks for today in my agenda (I should reschedule them) -
> complain if I have many same-level tasks and I haven't assigned
> priorities to them - complain if I hadn't estimated the effort of task
> which has taken a lot of time - …

All good things. A few more priority levels than 3 would be good. Probably.

>
>   I see there is much work to do. Many productivity improvements are
>   personal, so a single mode can't match all corrective needs. A
>   single file with a collection of working functions would be better;
>   then users can adapt to their needs the functions they want.
>
>
>   How does this utopia sound?  I alone can't develop this in time,
>   but: if we put a file in Worg or contrib/, could we collect all our
>   productiviy improvement tools and ideas?

Sure. At the moment though, the only big thing I was thinking of doing
was full blown SSML (speech synthesis markup language) support for org,
based on the existing html mode, using emphasis to handle various levels
of ***** and using paragraph breaks, and eliding [[][]] stuff more
correctly than what I have now.

>
>
> -- Daniel
>

-- 
Dave Taht
http://the-edge.blogspot.com