Another week is finished and I uploaded the 5 snippets that sum up to Episode 4 to YouTube. This week was about those topics:

Snippet 1: Ordered tasks

The E04S01 video shows how to enforce that tasks are finished in a given order. Ordered tasks are defined by an property called „ORDERED“. If this is st to „t“ (true) that means, that all children of this item are treated as a sequence, so to mark the 2nd children done the 1st one must be finished and so on.

Snippet 2: Timers

Timers are shown in the E04S02 video. They are great for setting up a countdown to do some brainstorming or even to cook some tea. You can easily start a countdown and if its finished, you get a small (but silent) notification.

There is also the possibility to start a timer and then add timestamps to notes that are relative to the starting time of 0:00:00. This way you can easily do some transcriptions of a video or whatever you’re watching.

Snippet 3: Clocking (aka time tracking)

The E04S03 video shows how you can track the time you spend ton your tasks. Time tracking is great if you have to write invoices for a client. Or if you just want to find out, how long a specific task or project takes. So for having an example I started the clock every time I worked on this episode. So when this blog post is finished I stop the clock and then I know, how much time I spent on producing this episode.

Snippet 4: Column view

The E04S04 video gives a short introduction to column view. Column view shows all headlines in columns and you can define what columns are shown. Columns can be the „item“ of the headline, the ToDo keyword or even the value of a property. In this example we show the clocked time in a column as a sum.

Snippet 5: Effort estimates

The E04S05 video shows how you can store effort estimates in a property called „Effort“. Effort estimates are shown whenever you clock a task so that you can easily see if your real time spent on the task is below or above the estimated effort. Efforts can be easily adjusted if you define standard values and use column mode again.

The road ahead

Now we are at 4 weeks into OrgMode, 20 snippets are produced and I received a lot of comments from people that learned a lot of new things about OrgMode. Going on with this needs now, that I make a collection of still open topics (e.g. linking is one of them) and then plan for the next episodes. I’m not sure that I can keep the pace to finish a 5 snippet episode every week, summer is there and I have a lot of things to get done in the house and garden. Nevertheless, I’ll go on with this because its big fun and by doing the videos I harden my knowledge about OrgMode.

So finally, for the records I now look at my clock sum for this episode and it says: 3:25. So I spent 3 hours and 25 minutes this week for all the tasks needed to produce the snippets and this blog post. The videos time sum up to around 45 minutes, so this means the real effort is 4.5 times more than the duration of the videos.

[ratings]