credmp

Tasks

A wonderful concept that has intrigued me for quite some time is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Wikipedia has a good short story on what the process is and how it should work.

This article however is about how I implement it into my daily routine at work to try and get the most out of a day. Firstly, I will introduce the software I utilize to get everything done.

Living inside Emacs

Since the year 2000 I have more and more started to live inside Emacs. I was introduced to Emacs by my mentor at the time, Charlie, and ever since that time I have moved more and more of my daily routine into Emacs.

In order to be fully effective with GTD within Emacs you need to get several modules up and running:

Gnus

The News and Mail reader for Emacs, should be included with any current Emacs distribution. There are some great articles on the Emacs Wiki that give tutorials and setup instructions, they are on the CategoryGnus page.

Muse

This is actually a sort of holy trinity when it comes to personal time planning, remembering stuff and documentation. Muse gives you all the documentation authoring tooling you require, it is actually what I am using now to type this blog post.

Planner

Planner gives you all the tooling you need to perform… well… planning of course. It is quite free form so it allows for all kinds of planning systems.

Remember

Remember, when used in combination with Planner, allows you to take context sensitive (i.e., aware of what files, news articles, blog posts, emails you are looking at) notes and store then as an association of a project, a date or any other piece of information you have within your Muse/Planner setup.

Yes, it does look like a lot of work to get my system up and running and no, you should not try to get all this working right now. I’ve spent the last 7 years of my professional life moving towards this point. This blog post is supposed to give you insight into how I do it, not how you should do it.

In order to get my system up and running, in regards to the Muse/Planner/Remember trinity, I have found the information and code snippets of Sacha Chua extremely useful.

Dealing with information

Anyways, when you have all the component set up you will quickly find yourself in productivity heaven. The nice thing about having everything within one single application is that it takes the minimum amount of effort to actually do something.

All the information that comes to you on a daily basis, except for human contact, is all regulated through the same interface and all the information is correlated to each other.

If we look at how what David Allen says about dealing with email for instance:

1. Start at the top.
   1. Deal with one item at a time.
   2. Never put anything back into ‘in’.
2. If an item requires action:
   1. do it (if it takes less than two minutes),
   2. delegate it, or
   3. defer it.
3. If not,
   1. file it for reference
   2. throw it away, or
   3. incubate it for possible action later.

Alight… so imagine 2 pieces of information come into your trusty Emacs; a news post and a blog post. Both deal with something you want to look at (in my case it was a news article on TAGS and a blog post on scalable web applications with the COMET engine).

It is totally useless to act on both right away, it would take way too much time. So from within my news / mail / blog reader (Gnus) I tell Planner to create a task for me from the current context. Planner will ask me what day I would think to perform this task while showing me my current calendar and all related information, entering a real date is only useful when there is some form of deadline, if not, it will always show up on my Friday review. Then it asks with what page I would like to file it, with TaskPool being the default. TaskPool is the standard target for all tasks. Since I want to deal with it later I can choose Incubator (or Next Action / Future if you will) and it will be in my files, at my fingertips but not in my way.

So, what does this information look like? I actually planned to do these tasks on a certain date and on the Planner page for that date, which pops up when I press ‘M-x plan’ it looks like this:

#B _ Try out Jetty / Continuations / DWR Reverse Ajax : E-Mail from Dion Almaer (Incubator)
#C _ Check out TAGS post : Post from Eli Zaretskii on gnu.emacs.help (Incubator)

It tells me I have a medium priority task to check out the Jetty / Ajax stuff, which was in an “E-Mail from Dion Almaer” (within Emacs I the text between quotes is a hyperlink pointing to the actual email) and a low priority task to check out what Eli was talking about on gnu.emacs.help in regards to TAGS.

The function ‘M-x planner-create-task-from-buffer’, which you normally will bind to a global key binding, has the absolutely great benefit that it also records your position in any type of file, if you are creating a task from it. The enables me to make quick reminder notes to check out, rewrite or do something else with code at a certain point in a file without actually disturbing the file itself.

When I use the key bindings that planner gives to change the status of the tasks I can actually also clock the time that I spent on specific tasks. This is great when you need it, useless if you don’t ;).

Making notes

Sometimes you need to take down some quick notes about something (once again, could be mail / news / blog posts or source code). This is where Remember comes in. By simply running ‘M-x remember’ you can quickly make a note and press ‘C-c C-c’ to save it. The note, with the first line as its heading, will be stored on the page that you specify. This could be a day page or a project page.

The end result will be an entry such as this:

.#1 Test entry 20:02 (2007.07.28#2)

I want to remember writing this file…

[[BeingProductiveInEmacs]]

Each note is of course based on a sequence (.#) which can be used for hyperlinking to it. Next to the actual text of the note it also contains a reference link to where you actually invoked remember. This, of course, is invaluable information when reading it back. you can quickly jump to the file, email, news post or blog post that is referenced.

Your own system

What I just described is just a fraction of the actual system that I use and you will have to find out for yourself what works best for you. My advise however is to make it is simple as possible and with the least amount of applications as you can. Constantly switching between applications while managing your tasks is one of the biggest slow-downs you can imagine.

To end it all I provide you with a few screenshots of what my Emacs windows look like while utilizing this system.