UOMF: How I'm Working With Tasks and My Agenda

This is an article from a series of blog postings. Please do read my "Using Org Mode Features" (UOMF) series page for explanations on articles of this series.

People get the impression that I'm perfectly organizing myself and my data because I spent so much time working with tools like orgmode. The truth is, that I don't think that I'm doing much better or worse than average. I occasionally miss a meeting, I can't find an information here or there and I accumulate unfinished tasks on my agenda.

This article is about how I handle those accumulated tasks and manage my agenda in general.

My current todo keywords are: TODO, STARTED, WAITING, CANCELLED, and DONE.

I schedule tasks when I want them so see on my agenda for various reasons. I rarely use deadlines. I rarely have hard deadlines for single tasks and those few are usually in my head and not necessarily on my agenda. So far, this did not result in missed deadlines for me.

I once had much more todo keywords but got rid of them. Let's discuss my latest changes in the next sections.

Currently unimportant tasks used to have a SOMEDAY keyword and were not scheduled.

I'm currently adapting the concept of four types of tasks from Marcin Borkowski's approach to TODOs for myself:

1. tasks that need to be done before certain date (or time)
   • any open todo keyword
   • DEADLINE (or SCHEDULED)
2. things I’d like to do “some day”
   • any open todo keyword
   • tagged with :someday:
   • no assigned SCHEDULED or DEADLINE date
3. things I’d like to do in the near future
   • any open todo keyword
   • SCHEDULED
   • tagged with :focus: (OR priority set to [A])
4. things I’d like to do every once in a while, but not necessarily on a regular basis
   • any open todo keyword
   • SCHEDULED

My adaptation for this concept includes moving tasks from the previously used SOMEDAY todo keyword to TODO or STARTED keywords with a :someday: tag and removing their scheduled date. This way, I unclutter my default agenda view by hiding those previously scheduled someday-tasks. If I like, I could define a new agenda showing only those :someday: tasks in the future.

Furthermore, I recently stopped using NEXT as a todo keyword. A while ago, I thought I'll use TODO for pending tasks that are "not ready yet" for some reason and NEXT for tasks I could start right away.

Meanwhile, I do not feel that I need to differ between those once I started to embrace easy to define task dependencies more and more. So I did a simple search and replace and got rid of NEXT.

At the moment, I don't use different agenda views. I only use on org-super-agenda setup to split up the open tasks into different sections:

1. Upcoming deadlines
   • rarely populated
2. Tasks tagged with :focus:
3. Priority A tasks
4. Started tasks
   • … that do not match above criteria
5. WATCHING (and previously SOMEDAY)
6. The rest
   • Actually the rest consists of three different sections but they're hard to explain even to myself so I keep it simple here.

To differ between business and personal view, I'm using one single category for business tasks. So I do have multiple categories for personal use and one for business. When I press < on a business item on the agenda, all personal tasks vanish. If I want to see only personal tasks, I press C-u < on any business task which hides all business task, showing the other categories.

When I want to have an item on my agenda independent of the current category filter, I create a second "surrogate heading" with the business category set in the PROPERTIES drawer. See the my-create-rise-appointment-surrogate function in my configuration on how I do that. This way, I notice personal appointments that might potentially conflict with the usual business hours.

In recent time, I stopped moving all unfinished but scheduled tasks from day to day when they're still unfinished.

Only the most important tasks gets moved from day to day: via S-right or marking them and bulk change via BS in agenda view.

The less important tasks stay at their original scheduled date so that I see how long they're pending.

No PIM tool is helping you to accomplish more tasks in the same time. If you do have too many tasks to do, you only are able to:

1. get more efficient while working on your tasks or spend more time working on your tasks
2. delegate more tasks to other people
3. re-prioritize tasks and mark more tasks as optional (:someday: tag)

When the task list of my agenda gets too long, I usually use the latter method. I go through all of my open tasks on the agenda. Less important tasks gets their scheduled date removed and :someday: tag set. They keep their todo keyword. This is much better than the previously used SOMEDAY todo keyword because this way, already started tasks that get "downgraded" keep their STARTED keyword which would otherwise be lost information when changing the todo keyword to SOMEDAY.

For example, I might have started with a task, found out that it requires too much effort for any reason and decided to put it in my backlog instead. By removing the SCHEDULED date and adding the :someday: tag, I keep its started-status while the task is not on my agenda any more.

yantar92 wrote on reddit:

I use dates for 1. Scheduled events, via timestamps; 2. for things I really, really plan to finish on that day, via SCHEDULED; 3. for things with deadlines, displayed some time in advance before the deadline. 4. Tasks that would be nice to be done, but do not have a hard deadline are marked NEXT.
I have several agenda views:
1. Urgent tasks I have to finish today no matter what - I focus hard on doing them; 2. Tasks I'd really prefer to do today, but if the day does not go as planned, it is not the end of the world; 3. NEXT tasks that I look into if and only if I finish (1) and (2).
From time to time, if NEXT tasks list grows too much (like a busy month at work), I mark some of NEXT tasks SOMEDAY to keep things manageable.
If my workload lowers and I can clear NEXT tasks list, I reach out to SOMEDAY and re-fill the NEXT task list.

This is a similar method compared to mine above.

If you have written about your method on how to handle tasks with Org-mode, drop me a line and I'll link it here if I do find it adds some value to the topic.