I am going to try blogging with gists.
This afternoon I went to a coffee shop and spent some time with other folks who're trying to Just Do Something. I've had an idea rattling around in my head for a while, but I haven't given myself space to try to grow it. I also realized a few weeks ago that I get really restless by the time the weekend comes. There's a lot of pent up mental energy, and it often gets lost in the first thing that catches my attention, even if that's not a worthy thing.
So when a friend of mine mentioned it helped her to have people around to stay on task, I said I'd like to do something like that and she invited me along.
They were hacking, and I meant to be outlining. I ended up doing something between planning and outlining, plus later a little bit of hacking.
I started out with a notebook and wrote a bunch of questions/ideas in it. Why? Well, I've been so stubborn about trying to use normal todo tools that I always start projects on paper before committing to the todo tools, because entering stuff into them is a nightmare and it's hard and fussy to move things around. Lots of mousing or searching around in menus to rearrange things or whatever.
Todo apps seem fine for "list of projects, list of tasks inside projects," but I haaaaaaate them if I want to put any kind of note in them. It's always either a mouse click or a special keystroke to go into the notes area of a task. And the notes areas are always unformatted. Maybe it's just the web publishing background, but at some point I got very fussy about headings and document structure generally: If I write a complex thing into a note in a todo, I want headings, lists, etc. and I want to believe there's a way to get them out of the todo app with their semantics intact.
So, I wrote all my questions and ideas out, then flipped over to my laptop so I could start trying to rough them into a todo app. Uuuuuuuuuuugggghhh. Gotta decide on whether to have an "Area," make a Project, then make todos inside it, then fiddle around with making notes. The tagging interface is garbage. Bizarrely, for purposes of creating documents out of the app's content, the "Areas" don't even contain the projects, in the scripting model, that they contain in the GUI. And the notes fields are dumb text.
I've been avoiding org-mode lately because I was struggling with the
lack of a good mobile option for it. I also hated some weird
things that happened with my files when I tried to use Dropbox as the
sync backend and I ended up losing planning work and todos. So today I
just moved my old org directory out of ~/Dropbox and into ~/org
and git inited it. Moooost of the time my org files move forward at
work, and the personal ones move forward at home, so I've got a new
habit to learn with fairly low stakes while I'm getting used to
pushing everything up at the end of a work session.
The mobile sync problem isn't solved with this, but I'm more
interested in capture than consumption, and beorg will allow me to
add todos to a file in iCloud that I can use org-refile from to get
inbox items into the appropriate file in my repo.
Suddenly, it's all better. org-mode thinks in outlines. org-mode is cool with a heading that's a todo, and a bunch of text underneath, then a listed set of tasks under that. org-mode is fine if I want to have my own states instead of "TODO" and "DONE."
For instance, after spending a bunch of time poking around with my project, I realized that most of what I had was questions: Decisions I'd need to make, or things that I don't know that I'd like to know before going much further. With org-mode, I can create a QUESTION todo state that gets its own styling and has semantic meaning, so it's possible to filter my files down to QUESTION items and their parents. It's very useful to be able to quickly generate a list of everything you don't know yet.
It's also great to be able to work within my plans in a literate manner, then generate custom views that show all the TODOs in a doc. I'm not writing notes into a little box, I can write prose underneath a task or question, and I can have a flexible hierarchy. It's entirely reasonable for an org document to be just a text file with headings, with the occasional TODO or QUESTION thrown in as a subheading.
All that said, my org-conf.el file is 190 lines long, and I have
accreted it over the years. It took a long time to get comfortable,
and even more time to tune it.