I’ve seen some questions lately asking if it’s worthwhile to learn Org mode. Regular readers will have no doubt as to my answer but I stumbled across a nice post from Charles Cave on how he uses Org capture, templates, and agendas to organize his day and log relevant information. The post is (probably) from a few years ago but its content is still up to date.
Like me, Cave records a lot of information that has an associated timestamp so he makes extensive use of datetrees in his capture templates. That’s really handy because Org-capture will file each entry in a 4-level hierarchy with the first three levels being year, month, day and the fourth level being the actual item. That makes it easy to see, for example, all the entries recorded in June of 2016. Being an Org file, all the headings are foldable so it’s easy to hide everything except the information you’re interested in.
You can also add one or more tags to each entry so if you want to see all the entries associated with, say, your dentist, it’s easy to pull them up by the “dentist” tag. One of the nice features of Org capture is that you can have the template prompt you for a tag. That makes it harder to forget to add them.
There’s much more so if you’re not familiar with Org capture and templates, take a look at Cave’s post to see what’s possible.