Irreal

The Eisenhower Matrix—so named because it was used by Dwight Eisenhower—is a technique of visualizing and prioritizing decisions by marking them urgent/non-urgent and important/non-important. If you mark each task with the two attributes, it will fall into one of four quadrants: important/urgent, important/non-urgent, non-important/urgent, non-important/non-urgent. The quadrant a task falls in helps you decide when, if ever, to deal with it. Take a look at the link above to see the details.

A few years ago, Tom Purl wrote a short post showing how to implement the Eisenhower Matrix in Org-mode. His system works pretty much the way you think it would. He has two potential tags for each task: “important” and “urgent”. The tasks get tagged with 0, 1, or 2 of the tags, which effectively puts them in one of the quadrants.

The rest of the system is a set of four agenda searches, which he labels “1”, “2”, “3”, and “4”. For example, the “2” search looks for the tags “+important-urgent”. Take a look at Purl’s post for the others if you are in any doubt.

The idea is simple but effective. If you’re looking for a way to get a handle on your tasks, first read the Eisenhower Matrix article and then Purl’s post for a simple implementation. You won’t need any fancy websites or apps: just Emacs.

Ryan Rix, who has the most well thought out and complete Emacs environment that I’ve seen has a post on the setup he uses for long form writing. By “long form” he means more than a paragraph or two on some subject. It’s mostly used for his blog and a set of private notes.

Most of the configuration deals with generating static pages for his blog. He uses a package called org-page to do most of the heavy lifting. That and the Org publishing system does just about everything he needs.

If you like Rix’s description of his Emacs working environment, you may enjoy his latest post too.

Someone tweeted a link to a 6-month-old post by Murat Demirbas, a computer scientist at SUNY Buffalo. The post, My Emacs Journey, describes Demirbas’ use of Emacs and his embracing of Org mode. He’s been using Emacs for over 20 years and says that he has reached the stage where his Emacs knowledge is mostly held in his muscle memory. He says that if you ask him what the key sequence for some command is, he can’t tell you until he types it and observes what he typed. I experience something similar: if you give me a key sequence and ask me what it does, I’ll have to stop and think and possibly won’t know even though I use it all the time without conscious effort. As Demirbas says, the knowledge is held in my muscle memory.

He writes at length about how Org mode changed his workflow. Like me, he uses it for writing, task management, and even to organize his thinking. I liked how he uses Org for his writing. It reminded me of a technique I’d forgotten about. When he’s writing a paper and defines a term, he turns it into a radio-target so that every time he uses it in the sequel, the new use gets turned into a link back to the definition. That’s a natural thing to do but I always forget about it.

I spent a long time reading his post because he had several interesting links to other posts or information. Take a look at his post to see what I mean.