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.