Re: [tlug] how to keep track of one's work... another 'BestPractices' question

[Sacha Chua <sacha@example.com>]

"Micheal E Cooper" <network-admin@example.com> writes:

> The wiki is great, and I still use it for relatively-static
> information, but for timestamped entries it seems unsuited. Another

If you live in your browser, a well-planned bookmarklet can save you
plenty of time. I use a bookmarklet to quickly add text to my personal
Pmwiki, and it's easy to set that up to be automatically timestamped
too.

> that, if I wanted to move all the built-up material in a wiki over to text
> or some other format, I would have to clean out the wiki codes. The last

Not that difficult, as wikis are just plain text anyway, and the
markup is very easy to remove. You don't even have to deal with the
markup for most tasks. For example, people have written all sorts of
external scripts to pull tasks out of Planner files and assemble them
into a schedule. Plain text is surprisingly powerful, and it's much
easier to trust than a binary file.

> reservations are (1) that I cannot just pop the wiki into my usb key
> memory, and (2) that finding exactly what I want quickly is just not
> practical. Or maybe I just don't know how.

You might be interested in GTDTiddlyWiki and other variants. Wiki in a
single file, perfect for USB keys. =) GTDTiddlyWiki is particularly
well-suited for keeping track of your tasks according to David Allen's
Getting Things Done method, which many geeks like.

> along with Sacha's Emacs planner-mode. They both facilitate the
> one-big-text-file approach.

Planner-mode can do one-big-text-file and lots-of-little-text-files.
It's even cooler if you take advantage of its automatic hyperlinking
and if you set it up with remember.el blogging and if you join the
community and- I can go on for a _long_ time, so I should probably
shut up now. <laugh>

> For over two years, I have been working out of a directory of text files,
> separated by topics and function (todo, contacts, one journal per day,
> etc.), and I am happy with it, especially the ability to rescue the files
> with a small USB memory key. However, there are limitations, which is why
> I have asked TLUG for the best-practices of experienced users.

Right! I talked about that in my Taming the TODO presentation. You
probably have a whole bunch of shell scripts that fit the way you
work, too. =)

Topics + function + day pages is also roughly how my Planner is
organized, although other people organize theirs differently. It's
easy to rsync all the text files onto a USB memory key, and a number
of people on the emacs-wiki-discuss mailing list regularly sync
between several computers. And yes, we have non-Emacs people trying
Emacs out just because they saw someone using Planner... <grin> Then
they get sucked into the blackhole, because once you can make tasks
that are hyperlinked to e-mail, contacts, web pages, or darn near
anything imaginable, it's hard to think of any other way of doing
things... =)
-- 
Sacha Chua <sacha@example.com> - open source, free software geekette
http://sacha.free.net.ph/ - PGP Key ID: 0xE7FDF77C
interests: emacs, gnu/linux, personal information management, public speaking
sachac on irc.freenode.net#emacs . YM: sachachua83