Re: [emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: Planner-Newbie

[James Clarke]

Sorry I'm a bit late on this thread :)

Sacha Chua writes:
 > So, everyone:
 > 
 > What's your current killer feature, the reason why you're playing
 > around with Planner?

I'm attempting to organise and track my life as a PhD student with
Planner.  At the moment this mainly consists of keeping track of the
papers I need to read and have read.  Hence the linking nature of
Planner is really useful for linking to my bibtex file.  For some
papers I also create a separate page in which I write notes or
thoughts about the paper, although this doesn't happen that often as I
annotate the hard copy of the paper too.

Currently I'm just assigning all tasks to 'today' (which get carried
forward) and to the relevant plan page (GeneralReading, SomeProject
etc).  My day page is starting to get quite long so I may start
assigning tasks to nil dates although I'm a little worried about
'losing' tasks as I rarely check plan pages, I use them mainly for
reviewing what I have done lately.

Sometimes Planner acts more like a log book where I'll do an unplanned
task (not currently listed in Planner) then I'll add the task as done
to Planner to keep a record of my work.  I guess this means I'm quite
bad at task realisation.

Hopefully having a list of everything I've done will make it easier to
write progress reports or my published plan pages could even replace
progress reports as my supervisor can review the pages directly.
Publishing the pages also motivates me to do work a little as a blank
day page looks bad and shows that I have been unproductive.

Over the Christmas break I'm going to look into the planner features
more deeply as I'm barely aware the current features.  I've just been
using remember for notes from emacs buffers (vm and files) and task
creation from buffers.  I'd like to start to experiment with timeclock
and other features to see how my work flow changes.

 > What's your main wishlist feature?

To be able to assign tasks to multiple plan pages.  As I generally
start out with a very general plan pages (eg GeneralReading) and then
I create more specific plan pages once I start to find some direction.
I'd like to be able to assign tasks so the general plan pages contain
all the tasks for the specific pages.  This could be done through a
hierarchical plan structure but I would prefer to have more freedom
and just be able to tag tasks freely (a la del.icio.us bookmarks).

James