Bernt Hansen

Your point could still partially apply to vim. But my main train of thought on reading this, as well as the sample configs offered above[0], is that it really is much too complex for my needs.

The amount of configuration and maintenance required, shuffling todo items around, filing, refiling - even the person whose setup is mentioned elsewhere[0] admits he had 373 tasks at that time - that doesn't sound organised to me!

I'll most likely stick to developing my 'plaintext vertical kanban' system, unless I dabble with the vim clone of org-mode. I do however get the ethos of the thing, and happily encourage it. I saw a fun quote at the top of one of today's HN front page articles:

Laziness is a virtue as it “makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure.”

— Larry Wall, founder of Perl

[0] http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html

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PS - slightly off topic, but saw in another comment here you still use org-mode on an N900 - I need to de-brick mine, but that involves splitting a USB cable and soldering it onto the test pads under the battery. It lasted for 5 years, performing brilliantly, and I was just about to put the easychroot Debian back on when disaster struck.

With that phone/device I had an SSH shortcut on the desktop to my various servers and also ran syncthing on it directly, barely affecting battery life, to keep phone and laptop notes in sync. I can still do most of that on the Ubuntu phone, but can't help feeling restricted. Sure I can enable…

TODO lists -don't- work? Maybe they'd work with some mindfulness, context and discipline? The author acts as if David Allen's "Getting Things Done" did not exist. GTD calls for all these things and, at the most basic level, you're tasked with assigning priority to, creating context outlines for and estimating time commitment for all of your tasks during the first time block in your morning.

GTD became well-known because it works. You just have to take the book seriously enough to both finish and internalize it. Difficult, perhaps, for many in the information-age [quick-fix-age]. GTD is a lifestyle versus a system. That's the only way it works.

Software: org-mode is what I use and it's amazing. You can create massive collapsable lists with TODOs, outlines, context with code-blocks that can be set to any language, direct links to files/emails/websites/almost-anything. It's versatility and scope is so enormous that it can be adapted to suite any conceivable need. Like scheduling? Go to a TODO item and CTRL-s (C-s for you fellow emacs users) and a calendar pops up. Select a date, hit enter and it's agenda'd. The agenda can be set up to send you reminders via iCal, Growl/libnotify/Snarl, appointment-mode, Remind, Google Calendar... practically anything!

The problem with these brilliant systems is the initial time commitment where there are no pats on the back (no insta-grata) and no payout of any kind. They're both intricate systems that work like a circuit - if the circuit…

It's always good to see Org mode flagged up (though it gets a
surprising amount of love on HN).

I use Org more or less constantly, and I'll take this opportunity to
note an Org-related observation that I've been mulling over for a bit.
It's apropos of nothing, but then so was this submission :)

The observation has to do with how new Org users get to know the
system. The whole thing can seem pretty daunting, especially when you
look at some of the
examples of TODO setups (http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html) in the
wild. Pretty crazy.

My nutshell advice for new users is: in the beginning, you should
emphasize learning to use Org's tools effectively, rather than
spending time organizing your Org files structurally. The initial
impulse is: I'm going to make this file look just like my brain (or my
project). Instead, learn to use the agenda commands, so that you can
make the Agenda look like your project, not the file.

A couple of reasons for this: If you start out trying to make
structure (and I'm also talking about very complicated TODO keyword
flowcharts), you're going to get it wrong, and it's going to be a pain
in the butt to fix. Learning Agenda commands, on the other hand, will
always provide you with more flexibility, not less. It will give you
the power to handle new situations easily, and to narrow your focus
with ease. (Actually the same principle applies to Emacs usage in
general.)

For instance: I do a fair amount of event and conference management,
little…

Org mode configs are really Emacs configs.

It's true it's easier to build your system in small pieces as you discover your needs, but it helps a ton to have a better idea of what can be accomplished through customization.

In my case, I didn't write any Elisp between 2004-2010 and probably used Org mode as a bullet list during that time. Until I had enough interest to read its documentation and explored how others are using it.

Only then was I able to come up with a half-decent solution that was still quite good, but really so far off of what can be accomplished with a better understanding of the parts at play in this mode, as demonstrated by Bernt Hanson's setup (http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html).

To this day I'm not even considering trying to rethink the way he is using Org mode because his setup works out perfectly for me, and I have to GTD like everybody else.

All I'm saying is it may not be obvious at first glance and without studying documentation but a very powerful set of tools are available in there and anyone with half a brain can use them, and that it's best to adopt complex-type configurations once you've wrapped your head around them.

Org mode is great. It took me some time to learn to love it, and I'm still not done customizing it - for example I just learned about org contrib modules and I need to go through them and enable what seems useful. I got some inspiration from this site: http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html and from some "tutorials" focused on "Getting Things Done" implemented in Org. One great feature Org provides is time logging, which let's you easily see how much time you spent on a given task. It's a blessing since I need to enter this data into Jira anyway - I just generate clock report from org and paste bits of it to Jira (I'm in the process of writing more automatic integration for this, too).

As for your workflow: do you know you could create "TODO types" instead of wrapping your projects in parens? You could style them to have different colors. There's "TODO keywords as types" page in Org info docs which describes this. You could also use priorities (but there are only three if i understand this correctly) or tags for this, but since I don't use any of them I can't tell you how exactly.

If you like the challenge of a steep learning curve, might I suggest org-mode for emacs? It's got tasks, todos, built in agenda calculation, and so on. Also it's shipped as default with emacs. For something like a "waiting" status, you can easily reconfigure the default to-do states on a global or per file basis, and even have several different sets of states for tasks.

Here's a pretty handy guide showing what you can do with it, and then there's allways the org-mode documentation which outlines all features.
http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html

I've got a friend of mine who uses it for literally everything from notetaking to planning projects and billing project time, and I'm slowly getting into it as well. If Evernote's greatest strenght is flexibility, this will certainly give it a run for its money.