Irreal

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about John Kitchin’s use of SQLite to index his Org files. Kitchin uses Org mode as a centerpiece of his workflow and has about 5 years of files spread across his local file system, Dropbox, Google Drive, and other places. His idea was to index the files on headline, tags, citations, and a bunch of other fields that you can see by following the above link.

Now Kitchin is continuing his experiment by using the noSQL database MongoDB. It turns out that there are some advantages to using MongoDB but also disadvantages. Follow the link to see how easy it is to build the database and some strategies for getting the information out again. He continues the experiment in a subsequent post on implementing CRUD operations in MongoDB, which you should also read.

Kitchin’s work on indexing Org files along with Karl Voit’s approach to the same problem is really interesting. Those of us who put more and more of our lives and work product in Org files are, sooner or later, going to need something like this. Currently, I rely on tags or, if all else fails, a text search to find the entry I’m looking for but that only works for agenda files. So unless I’m careful to put a link to my work product in my journal (or one of the other agenda files) searching for tags won’t work. There is also, I suppose, a scaling problem. Once I get enough data, searching for tags or text is going to be too slow.

If you find yourself using Org for a significant part of your workflow, you should read these posts to help you get ready for the day that your own files get too large for easy searching.

Karl Voit has published an instructive post on how to specify recurring events in Org mode. As most of you know, you can annotate an Org TODO entry to specify that it should occur every day, every week, every 3^rd day and other more complex criteria.

Even if you’re familiar with the above, Voit has an alternative method that I wasn’t aware of. That method is org-clone-subtree-with-timeshift that will duplicate the current entry but apply different time stamps. This has some benefits over the more common method. In the first place, if you have a meeting on Tuesday for the next 5 weeks, you can make the first TODO entry and then call org-clone-subtree-with-timeshift with a repeat of 4 and a timeshift of 1w. That gives you the exact number of entries and can edit or delete one or more as necessary. Another benefit is that you can add notes to each entry separately rather than having everything together in a single entry.

Take a look at Voit’s post for the details and more advantages of this method. It’s also a nice summary of how you can specify dates and times whether or not they’re recurring.

Gregory J Stein, an MIT Ph.D student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has an interesting post on how he uses Org mode and the agenda to organize his projects and daily tasks. Like all graduate students, he leads a busy life so seeing how he leverages Org mode in his workflow is interesting and instructive.

Like me, Stein uses his agenda as a journal of what he’s done on a given day as well as keeping track of tasks that need to be done. Part of that is a fairly rigorous use of clocking to track his time. While that’s mostly a matter of developing the right habit patterns, he also has Org set up to automate it as much as possible.

One interesting strategy is his use of the MEETING keyword for his agenda. That keyword is used for scheduling meetings, of course, but he also uses it if some drops by his desk while he’s working. He has a capture template for meeting that automatically stops the clock on his current task and resumes it when the “meeting” is over. That’s a nice way of handling interruptions to your timed tasks. You could, of course, just stop the clock manually but if you’re like me you’ll almost never remember to do that so Stein’s method is a win.

There’s some other useful ideas in the post so you should be sure to give it a read. He also has a link to his configuration so you can see the details of how he set up his environment.