Re: [emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: planner.el questions, suggestion for planner.pdf

[pll+ew]

>>>>> On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, "Sacha" == Sacha Chua quoted Maciej Kalisiak:

  +> is it possible
  +> to specify tasks more verbosely somehow? For example, I might
  +> want to create a task "build foo", and at the same time I might
  +> have a brief idea on how to perform this task, and so I would
  +> like to somehow attach this info to the task, perhaps as an
  +> explanatory paragraph.

>>>>> On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, "Maciej" == Maciej Kalisiak wrote:

  Maciej> Ahhhh!  So the workflow becomes: have an idea, scribble it
  Maciej> down and possibly brainstorm, list any hints or rough task
  Maciej> breakdown you see, all in a note or two, and then use that
  Maciej> as the starting point for planning and creating tasks.  Kind
  Maciej> of different from my previous workflow (mostly emacs- wiki
  Maciej> + allout outline giving a highly annotated and hierarchical
  Maciej> todo tree; not very pretty, but sort of functional).  I
  Maciej> think I can work with this, cool.  I'll experiment and
  Maciej> tailor further.

(I've been meaning to explain my workflow for a while, as some 
recently requested we all do so.  This seems as good a time as any :)

I'm a sysadmin, so my day is is quite interrupt driven.  I "projects" 
which I'm supposed to be working on, but never actually get the 
chance to; the users are *supposed* to submit help requests to our 
request tracking system (RT - see http://www.bestpractical.com), but 
mostly don't.  As a result, I consistently and constantly get 
interrupted from whatever I may be currently doing at any time.
Add to that a manager who has little understanding of how IT groups 
really work, and a communication breakdown between our group, her, 
and upper management, and you get chaos :)

Paper is my enemy.  Anything handed to me on paper immediately gets
placed in a pile on the nearest horizontal surface (those are my enemy
as well :)  I have lots of notebooks buried under these resulting
piles which I've often tried to take notes in as I do stuff, but, well
(as a good friend and mentor once said to me) you can't grep dead
trees!

Enter emacs-wiki, planner, and remember :)

I live in emacs for almost all my editing and (what little I get to 
do) coding.  With emace-wiki, I've finally found the perfect tool for 
all the documentation I write (though I haven't yet played with muse!)

Adding planner to the mix has allowed me to be far more task/project 
oriented than I've ever been in my life, and publishing this has 
greatly increased communication between me and my manager, who now 
seems to understand a lot better the trials, tribulations, and 
interruptions in the life of a sysadmin :)

I spend most of my time in a daily page, organized thusly:

- Diary
- Tasks
- Notes

I changed the default order for 2 reasons: 1) I seldom have many 
Diary enties, usually at most 2 on any given day. 2) my notes section 
is the most dynamic and can grow quite long.  This ordering allows my 
notes section to grow infinitely while leaving my Diary and Task list 
in the same place all the time at the top of every page.

The notes section I use to log whatever I'm working on or any 
interruption I encounter.  Each note has a heading, and immediately 
under that heading is a 'Time:' section (which I need to manually 
enter).  This allows me to quickly 'grep ^Time:' on any page and see 
if my accounted for time mostly adds up to a full day :)

Each note may or may not be linked to another page.  I originally 
started just having project pages which had Tasks and cross-linked 
Notes, however, I've recently begun using what I refer to as Category 
pages, which are really project pages with nothing by Notes.  The 
purpose is to be able to track how much time a certain category of 
interruption costs.  For instance, I have a DesktopHelp category 
which is any interruption which requires me to visit the users 
desktop and help them.

wrt projects, I think very hierarchically as you mentioned you do.  
While ideally I would like to be able to have hierarchical task 
listings, what I currently do is this:

 
 - Create a project page
 - Create all tasks for this project (possibly without dates)
 - Create a task on a daily page for the project with the project 
   page name as the task item, e.g.:

   #A1 _ StuffToDo {{Tasks:10}} (2004.07.08)

This allows my daily to-do list to not get too cluttered up with
project specific task items.  On the project page, when I need to have
a task which has subtasks, I'll do one of 2 things: either I'll
reference a note within the project page within the task item itself,
e.g.:

   #A1 _ Project task [[Project#1]]  {{Tasks:23}} (2004.07.10)

Then, under Note .#1, I'll keep a running log of stuff related to 
this particular task.  Occasionally I'll add an 'Update: <timestamp>' 
line to a note, and recently, I've begun placing sub-note links in
these as well:

  .#1 some note (2004.07.01)
 
   Some text

  #1a Updated: Thu Jul  1 16:38:09 EDT 2004 (2004.08.01#7)

These sub links are then in turn pointed to by Notes within my daily 
page:

  .#7  Updated: Thu Jul  1 16:38:09 EDT 2004 (ProjectPage#1a)

This allows me great flexibility to keep notes within tasks all
together, but also cross-reference them to daily pages.  I can, in
theory, now account for the amount of time a project/task/interruption
took as a whole *AND* how much time out a particular day it cost me.

The other thing I may do is create a sub-project page if it warrants
it where that page name is something like ProjectnameSubtask.  This 
allows me to break big projects down into smaller but related 
projects.  I don't do this quite as often as I do the former however.

I have by no means tapped the majority of the potential provided by 
these tools.  I'm greatly looking forward to being able to link 
my e-mail into 'remember', but, since I don't currently use emacs for 
e-mail, it's going to quite a while before that happens :(

So, this is how I work.  I hope it helps someone figure out how to do 
something that works for them.  And, perhaps, someday, some of the 
stuff I do manually can be incorporated into planner/remember and 
allow me to automate a little more of my life :)

Sacha, John, Gary, Jody, et al, thanks for all the help, support, and 
great tools, it's litterally saved me from hating my job :)

-- 
Seeya,
Paul

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