As you all know, I’m a huge Org Mode fan but Álvaro Ramírez’s use and customization of it dwarfs mine. Yesterday, I wrote about how Ramírez was an expert at finding solutions to small problems and that those solutions can payoff by reducing some of the friction in our day-to-day chores.
In his latest post, Ramírez demonstrates this again by recounting how his use of Org Mode has evolved over the last decade. He started as many of us suggest: he chose a single task to automate with Org. That was making technical notes for his own use. But then he wanted to be able to access those from his iPhone when he was away from his computer. His solution was to simply export them to HTML—thereby learning another bit of Org Mode—and publish them so that he could access them from anywhere. He described it as accidentally falling into blogging. He’s still using the same (large) file for everything he publishes to the Web.
From there, his Org use continued to grow. Many of the apps that we associate with Ramírez actually grew out of his Org mode use. His post is fairly long and describes all this. Even his wonderful app, Journelly, grew out of his desire to integrate Org mode with his iPhone and its portability.
A lot of Ramírez’s work is available for download or purchase but perhaps the most important thing is seeing how he solved one small problem after another until he’d built up a powerful system for handling his data. If you’re an Org user or want to be one, you should definitely take a few minutes to read his post.