[pumblechook]

Kudos to the author for trying to bring org mode to a wider audience. It was definitely the gateway drug to Emacs for me, and now that I've been using org for awhile I honestly can't see myself ever switching to another personal task manager/productivity tool. I always recommend it to others, but alas, the Emacs barrier is too big for most to overcome.

I do have one suggestion: don't try to emulate the feature set of Emacs org mode exactly. While I love org mode, the setup time and effort was many orders of magnitude greater than any other tool I've used before, and I can't say it enabled me to be many orders of magnitude more productive. I would love to have an org mode with sensible defaults (such as indented bullets, project-based agenda view, etc...) with a narrow feature set. For me, the killer features are:

* Mixed notes and TODOs. It was a revelation to be able to just type a TODO into any notes and know that this will magically appear on my master TODO list. But for this to be useful, you really need...

* The agenda view. For those not familiar, this is essentially a consolidated list of todos across all your org files. But I never found the default agenda view that useful, so I again spent lots of time writing one myself. Now I use it many times a day.

* Timers. The way org mode does timers is miles better than any other time tracking software I've ever used.

* Flexible 'projects'. In org mode I have a lot of flexibility in how I treat projects (for me a project is simply a TODO with 1 or more nested TODO). With my agenda view I can quickly see all my projects with two keystrokes.

* Flexible TODO recurrence. Most task managers only let you repeat a TODO every so often, but org has a powerful syntax for defining whatever recurrence pattern you want (i.e. do this task every week on Friday and have it done within 3 days)

* TODOs dates as scheduled or deadlines. It is always surprising to me how other task managers don't recognize this difference. If you schedule yourself to do something on a certain date, it is very different than saying 'you have to get this done by this date'.

* TODO workflows. Most task managers have tepid support for a TODO as a workflow with potential alternate and blocking states (such as waiting on someone before you can do the TODO), but with org mode you can precisely define TODO workflows and do all sorts of cool stuff with them.

* Habits. The way org does habits is simply brilliant.

Keep up the good work!

[mjb394]

How does your agenda view differ from the default?

[pumblechook]

I combined a few different views into one using Bernt Hansen's custom agenda as a starting point (http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#CustomAgendaViews). It includes everything I need - schedule for today, a list of projects, stuck projects, etc... Typically I will just go by today's schedule, but it is invaluable having my list of projects on the same screen so I can just tab over in a separate buffer to the actual org file if I need more detail (or if I want to see notes for a given project).

[ac]

Not the parent poster, but I have custom agendas too. The two I use the most are "Today" and "Weekly review". "Today" has the ordinary day agenda block, but sprinkled with habits tracking, as well as the separate list of NEXT actions, sorted by priority and complexity. The view is structured to answer the "What should I be doing right now?" very quickly.

The "Weekly review" is made for a (slightly tweaked) GTD review. It allows me to review all the finished tasks in one plays, which I archive or refile for future reference (this is to mitigate the downside of mixing TODOs with notes --- you might lose important info when you archive a DONE task). Next block reviews the tasks where I'm waiting on something or someone. I can update their status and close them if whatever I was waiting on has happened. Then there are new tasks from my inbox (org-capture) that I refile and assign priorities/schedules/deadlines too. Then there is the agenda for the next week, so I have a chance to plan my work and schedule more tasks if I have the capacity. Then there is the review of all the NEXT actions. Then there are the SOMEDAY tasks, which I review and occasionally promote to TODOs or NEXT actions.

I'm also tinkering with agenda views that give longer term perspective for project planning. However, I'm already running into the limitations of agenda views.

Most of it is inspired by Bernt Hansen's (cited by the OP) and Sacha Chua's configs, though they are doing even more sophisticated stuff at times.

[pumblechook]

I've been meaning to do an agenda view for weekly reviews for awhile, but my master view works well enough. What I'd really like is an agenda view that approximates a burn down chart and gives me a suggested velocity for next week (or some arbitrary period of time) based on the difference between my effort estimates and actual clocked-in time. A task aging view would also be nice to remind me about tasks on my list that have been idle for awhile so I can update them.

But alas, this is the beauty and curse of org mode. I could do this, but will the time investment really make me that much more productive? Maybe, but maybe not.