Charles Choi has published an interesting post on defining org agenda tasks. All Org users, I’m sure, are familiar with the Org Agenda that lists the Org headlines in each of the files in org-agenda-files and provides a link to each of those headlines.
The agenda is actually pretty malleable. Lots of people—perhaps most people—use it as a sort of calendar to list and track their tasks and appointments. I do some of that too but I also use it as a sort of log file of my daily activities. It’s easy to adopt it to your particular workflow.
To a first approximation, Choi’s post deals with ways of controlling when items appear in the agenda. For example, you may want a task to appear in the agenda around the time you’re supposed to start working on it and stop appearing when it’s completed. There are all sorts of nuances controlling the display of agenda items and even the experienced Org user may not be familiar with them all.
Choi then moves on to clocking tasks and how to handle that from the agenda. It is, he says, easiest to start and stop the clock from the agenda. In addition, there are speed keys to display the times spent on a task. Something I didn’t know was that you can arrange for a timer to persist over Emacs invocations. Choi explains how to set this up. If you’re using clocking, you should definitely do this.
Finally, Choi ends his post with a short list of best practices for dealing with the agenda. The post is definitely worth a few minutes of your time.