Quick Notes

In my continuing quest to make better use of the Org mode agenda facility, I’ve implemented a way of capturing quick notes that are meant to be ephemeral and not saved long term. It’s a good way to capture information while I’m on the phone or otherwise need to capture some data quickly and deal with it later. For example, maybe someone calls and wants to change the time of an appointment. I can just capture the new time and update my calendar after the call.

The capture template is ridiculously simple. It just grabs a headline and any associated text and puts a timestamp at the end. The capture template is

("q" "Quick Note" entry (file "~/org/quick-note.org") "* %?\n%U")

The quick-note.org file has #+FILETAGS: QN in the header so that it’s easy to find them with a custom agenda view. Here it is:

("q" "Quick Notes" tags "QN" nil)

Once I’ve acted on the note, I can type 【Ctrl+k】 to delete it from the agenda and quick-note.org file.

This is a really simple thing but something I’m almost certainly going to use a lot. Even though it’s simple, I had to do a bit of research to figure out all the details so I’m recording my process here in case any of you want to do the same thing.

This entry was posted in General and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.