I’m doing a daily plan in orgmode since August 2014. Recently I optimized that a little bit.
The trigger came when I listened to this episode of „Beyond the To-Do list“ with Michael Hyatt. Michael said something that is very true:
If everything has a priority then nothing has a priority.
So he suggests to put the 3 most important tasks on your list. That made me think that I should make a template for my daily plan that looks like this:
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+ [ ] The 3 most important tasks [/] - [ ] - [ ] - [ ] + [ ] Other tasks that are in the system [/] - [ ] + [ ] ToDos which are not tracked by my system [/] - [ ] |
So this means I can put the 3 most important tasks for today on top of it. This is what really needs to be done when the day is finished. Â And I limit myself to have only 3 tasks there. Â The next section in this tree is things that I have filed in orgmode. That means every entry in this section has a link back to my orgmode file. The 3rd part is about small things that I don’t track like „doing laundry“ or „play Mario Kart with my son“. That doesn’t mean that this stuff is less important, but there is not much use in putting a recurring task for that in my system. I decide on the spot in the morning if I have to do laundry or not.
The capture template line looks like this:
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("pD" "Daily Plan" plain (file+datetree "~/Dropbox/org/plan-free.org") (file "~/Dropbox/org/tpl-dailyplan.txt") :immediate-finish t) |
This is in my „private“ capture hierarchy. So if I press („capture“) and then „pD“ it copies the content of my template file in a datetree. That means I have an empty plan for the actual day within 3 keystrokes. The „:immediate-finish t“ property (set to true) means that orgmode doesn’t query anything at this moment, it just pastes the template in my plan-free.org file.
I started to use this „hack“ three weeks ago and I feel very good with it. It perfectly shows the most important things for every day and keeps me focused on what is really important.
[ratings]
Hallo Reiner, schön von dir wieder etwas über orgmode zu lesen. 🙂 Ich bin ein Fan deiner Serie. Ich sehe du verwendest offenbar Dropbox zur Synchronisation. Hast du schon mal von orgzly gehört und von syncthing? Ich habe die beiden für mich entdeckt und bin sehr zufrieden damit. Orgzly ist eine Android App die orgmode ganz gut kann, und mit syncthing kann ich die Inhalte bzw org- Dateien zwischen den Beteiligten austauschen.
Danke dir für alles und
Gruß
Michael
Hallo Michael, Orgzly habe ich auf dem Androiden installiert, aber noch nicht wirklich ausprobiert. 😉 Ich kämpfe mich gerade durch den Vorweihnachtsstreß, eine neue Folge für die Videos ist schon seit längerem geplant, aber ich feile noch ein wenig am Inhalt. Orgzly will ich auch irgendwann mal in einem Video behandeln, aber das bedeutet dass ich schauen muss, wie das mit dem Abfilmen vom Smartphone klappt, denn einen Screencast vom Smartphone kann man ja eher kaum machen.
I have a similar capture template „daily plan“ (or „daily wins“) for the three most import tasks of the day. It’s recommend in „Zen to done“ and „Agile results“ (by J.D. Meyers).
From „Agile results“ I also have a template for the three import tasks (or outcomes) of the week (Meyers calls it „Monday visions“) and a template for „how was my week“ (Meyers calls it „Friday reflections“). I need to be more consistent with using these templates 🙂
The „reflections“ I actually do during my weekly review. So far I enter a comment to my journal that says what went good or bad in the past week. Good idea, I also could autmate that by using a template.