[emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: tenmins

[Sacha Chua]

thomas knoll <address@hidden> writes:

> Can anyone take Jeff Covey's [[
> http://www.43folders.com/2005/09/jeff_covey_runn.html][tenmins
> idea]] and make it work for planner? I would really really benefit
> from a script like this, and it seems perfect for planner- (what do

Hmmm...

Okay. What are the pieces we need for this?

* We need to find out which tasks to bring to the foreground. Some
  options:

  - Look for all the unscheduled tasks on today's page, and just cycle
    through them. (Or do more sophisticated stuff! Anything goes, really.)
  - Cycle through a predefined or specified list of project pages,
    listing the next action.
  - Cycle through predefined or specified list of project pages,
    displaying the planner page. (Example: calls).

  At any rate, we'll need to store the current task, and have
  something that figures out the next task given the current one. My
  planner-config.el has sacha/planner-what-am-i-supposed-to-be-doing,
  which is similar to what we need to use in order to keep track of
  the current task. So we just need to decide where we're going to get
  the next action from.

  If you want to get _really_ fancy, we could make this a list of
  functions...
    
* We need to pop up a reminder

    appt.el might do the trick. planner-appt.el already interfaces
    with it, so it should be easy to figure out how to get it to alarm
    in 10 minutes. Hey, you know, that'd be useful for tasks with
    estimated times, or as an anti-procrastination tool...

    I'm not entirely sure how to do the countdown clock, but since
    there's some kind of a clock in the modeline (display-time), there
    should be _some_ way to get a nice countdown...
    
* It would be nice if we could deal with time estimates so that short
  tasks bubble up to the top automatically.

    If you encode your time estimates in your tasks somehow, then we
    can parse that out and sort it by task length. I remember seeing
    something in Planner that used stuff like "2h" and "30min",
    although I don't think we did any sorting. Should be easy to add
    something like that in, or you could use a special code (express
    everything in minutes, like 120min), which would then be easy to
    extract and use the sort key.

    Planner task sorting can be insanely cool. For example, on my day
    pages, I want to see scheduled tasks first, then the unscheduled
    tasks arranged by priority and status. On plan pages, I want to
    see _unscheduled_ tasks first. =)

I think we've got the pieces for this one. =)

If your tasks vary in length, it might be a good idea to get the tasks
sorted the way you want to, 'cause that's fairly easy to do in Planner
and fairly hard to do outside Planner. If you're familiar with regular
expressions, you'll probably have fun redefining the sorting functions
in Planner. Steal anything you want from
http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/emacs/planner-config.el . =) (I may
end up hacking time estimate sorting into my config tomorrow, when I
wake up)

Next fun step would be the appointment support. planner-appt might
have example code we can borrow.

I can help you write the next-action code when we figure out where you
want the next action to come from.

Sounds like a fun idea. <grin>

> we call it now? planner-mode? planner-muse?) Closely related to
> this, I want to learn lisp, so that I can start hacking planner, and
> would like to know where to start?

The Emacs Lisp Intro (eintr, I think) is a good place to start. Also,
reading the source code for your favorite Planner functions or the
snippets you see on the mailing list will help you pick up ideas... =)

Sacha

-- 
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