elarson’s posterous

I've got to say that org-mode has been treating me rather well. To contrast this, I also started playing with Evernote on my iphone. In theory, Evernote seems really helpful for working with todo lists. It has been reasonably nice for things like going to the store to buy a list of things. One feature that seemed really helpful was the ability to take a picture of something as a note. I took a picture of a pedal board I was making for Lauren that had some measuremeants on it. Unfortunately, for some odd reason, it wasn't saved. I think this happened when I tried to write a note that went along with the photo. It wasn't a huge deal and I'm sure user error was part of the equation, but I really hope that the photo feature is able to let jot down some notes in addition to simply having a picture.

Going back to org-mode, I found this tutorial. I had read it plenty of times before but it didn't really click what was happening. I was always frustrated that the agenda side of org-mode required configuration. That was probably more a function of my own lack of understanding tweaking my .emacs file than a real negative. Now that I'm more familiar with Emacs Lisp, doing small configuration details in my .emacs doesn't seem like nearly as big a deal. After all, that is what it is there for!

This morning I went ahead and create a few different org files to better manage my todo list items. The next step will be to migrate my current todo file to the different files and start throwing in a few deadlines (C-c C-d). Hopefully once that is working, the agenda side of org can be of more use to me. The end of that tutorial mentions a time log of sorts as well, which seems pretty helpful. The other idea is to use the org clock in/out feature which I've used in the past.

At one of my jobs I had to do a lot of service work that was billable which meant keeping track of time. Org-mode was very helpful there in the end. I did write a small command line utility as well, but maintaining it was just silly. We had an idea for a script we called brain that acted like a catchall for generic tools to help productivity. It was kind of modeled after Paste's paster command. We used IronPython for it and it ended up being somewhat helpful. If I were to do something like that I think I would use Paver. In fact, this gives me an idea!

It will be trivial to write a simple paver command that lets me sync a rendered version of my todo list to my server. I can also use emacs on the server to re-gen the HTML view after editing it. It should be really simple to have an edit window with the text and then regen on the server. The on my home machine, I'll effectively pull down any changes and be on my way. At the very least, pushing via paver will be trivial.

What is nice is that thanks to my recent todo list, I really have been more productive. There have been a million things to do before tour and it hasn't been that bad getting them all done along side taking care of my work. While it is pretty mundane, I'm still really excited.