[emacs-wiki-discuss] Nifty hack: planner-use-day-pages

[Sacha Chua]

Hello, everyone!

I like thinking about planning methods and I've been reading up on
personal information management research. planner.el is a wonderful
testbed for ideas because people use it in so many different ways! For
example, I use it to keep track of my reactive tasks (bugs I need to
fix, e-mail I need to reply to: generally related to a few major
projects) as well as the stuff I've planned. Other people use day
pages exclusively. Still others put all their tasks on plan pages.

Here's a new option for those people: planner-use-day-pages. If you
set it to nil, planner won't ask you for dates when you create tasks
and notes. plan and planner-goto-today will take you to the
WelcomePage instead of today's page.

   (setq planner-use-day-pages nil)
   (require 'planner)

You can also use this for planning tasks mostly on plan pages, with
the occasional day task thrown in. The following code defines a way
to create a task from the buffer without prompting for a date.

   (require 'planner)

   (defun my-planner-create-task-from-buffer ()
     "Call `planner-create-task-from-buffer', but without dates."
     (interactive)
     (let ((planner-use-day-pages nil))
       (call-interactively 'planner-create-task-from-buffer)))

Then you can use C-c C-c (planner-copy-or-move-task) to schedule the
occasional task onto a day. This probably improves the support for the
GTD method, because that one focuses less on day-scheduled tasks.

How do you organize your work? I'd love to hear about it. The more
planning suggestions we can add to the wiki / info file, the
better. <grin> Your suggestions might not only give other people cool
ideas, but also help make planner more flexible.

-- 
Sacha Chua <address@hidden> - Ateneo CS faculty geekette
interests: emacs, gnu/linux, making computer science education fun
http://sacha.free.net.ph/ - PGP Key ID: 0xE7FDF77C