[emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: More flexibly named "Time" pages

[Sacha Chua]

Greg Novak <address@hidden> writes:

> What I'm finding works better for me is to plan from the top down,
> rather than the bottom up.  That is, each month I choose the two or
> three things that are my _highest_ large scale priorities for that

Ahhh! You want Franklin-Covey-style planning, applying the First
Things First principle. (I spend a lot of time reading productivity
books so that I can drop buzzwords like that. ;) )

Okay. You don't need to do anything special in Planner to do that. All
you need is a whole bunch of functions that will let you easily
navigate between day, week, month and year pages.

One way to do that would be to define functions like:

greg/planner-get-page date period - returns the planner page for the time period
  ex: "2005.08.01" 'week -> "2005.August.Week1"
greg/planner-zoom-in - interactive, moves down one step
greg/planner-zoom-out - interactive, moves up one step
greg/planner-pan-right - move to the next time period
greg/planner-pan-left - move to the previous time period

You can use another variable for your base date for zooming (set it to
the current date or today).

Bind convenient keyboard shortcuts to navigate in, out, left and
right, and there you go.

For extra fun and profit, you can add buttons or links to your planner
pages that make it easy for you and other people to go up to week,
month and year views. =) We can also add a custom HTML tag that
displays the calendar for the week, and so on.

Could you give this a shot? I won't be able to start working on it
until after my first Toastmasters speech this Tuesday, but it sounds
like a great idea!

> month, and year, since you planned the high levels first and
> "trickled down" to the low levels. This has the nice side-effect
> that things which _seem_ important but _aren't_ important to achieve
> your goals never even make it into your day pages.

This is well worth doing! A lot of people like planning their week up
front, and it's always good to support another way of doing things. =)

>> Not as elegant but far more doable with our current infrastructure
>> would be to use planner-multi to associate each task and note with
>> pages for the other time periods.
> Yes, in fact this is what I'm doing for the time being.

Great! The next step would be to write functions that make this task
easier.

> For what I want to do, at least, the Year page shouldn't take long to
> publish because it should contain _only_ information relevant to your

Excellent idea! =D

> The upshot, it seems, is that there isn't a slick way to hack
> planner-date-regexp to do what I want.  So I'd imagine splitting

I don't think you'll need to. =)

> If I do this, what are the chances that the patch could be
> integrated into the main branch of the code? Does the above seem
> reasonable?

At the very least, it will be a frequently used and recommended config
file we pass on to newbies. Hey, if we can work out a nice interface
for it, it would be _great_ to have as planner-zoom.el... 

-- 
Sacha Chua <address@hidden> - open source geekette
http://sacha.free.net.ph/ - PGP Key ID: 0xE7FDF77C
interests: emacs, gnu/linux, personal information management, juggling
sachac on irc.freenode.net#emacs . YM: sachachua83