An Org Refile Workflow

Yiming Chen has an interesting post on his org-refile workflow. Before you read his post, though, you should (re)read Aaron Bieber’s Organizing Notes With Refile that I wrote about back in 2018. Bieber’s post gives you the background you need to follow Chen’s.

If you’re a little hazy on the Org-refile concept, the TL;DR is that you can move an Org tree node someplace else. Some like Matus Goljer use it to deal with items from Org-capture. Others use it to move items to a more appropriate place or as a sort of archiving operation. If you use Ivy or Helm, when you call org-refile you’re presented with a list of possible targets to which to move the node.

That list is completely configurable. A common choice is to include all the headers from all the Org files that make up your agenda, but that’s not the only possibility. You can add other Org files, including the current one, or as Chen demonstrates, you can add all headers in all Org files on your system. Most people probably won’t want to do that but it’s possible.

One of the reasons that Chen includes everything in his target list is that he likes to use it as a way of jumping to a specific Org node. You can do that by specifying the universal argument to org-refile. Take a look at his post for all the details. Org-refile can make many workflows easier so it’s worth taking a look at these posts to see if it can reduce some friction in yours.

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