WEBVTT 00:00:00.220 --> 00:00:03.400 Welcome to my talk, Lead Your Future with Org. 00:00:03.400 --> 00:00:04.680 Who am I? 00:00:04.680 --> 00:00:05.680 I'm Andrea. 00:00:05.680 --> 00:00:10.060 I work as a Scala software engineer somewhere in the Netherlands, and I inherited my passion 00:00:10.060 --> 00:00:12.340 for Emacs from my PhD supervisor. 00:00:12.340 --> 00:00:15.050 From that moment on, I got in synergy with it. 00:00:15.050 --> 00:00:19.830 You can find more about me and my interests at https://ag91.github.io. 00:00:19.830 --> 00:00:27.150 That is the place where I keep my blog and I blog on a weekly basis. 00:00:27.150 --> 00:00:29.449 Let's get into the bulk of the talk. 00:00:29.449 --> 00:00:31.679 Why I needed a vision. 00:00:31.679 --> 00:00:34.360 The main, main problem is that I have too many interests. 00:00:34.360 --> 00:00:37.740 I like a lot of things, and these things take time. 00:00:37.740 --> 00:00:44.000 Then I have too little time to do other things that are very important as well. 00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:46.430 And so I need priority. 00:00:46.430 --> 00:00:51.750 And the vision in my mind is both an ambition, something that I want to do with my life, 00:00:51.750 --> 00:00:59.220 and at the same time, it's a way to focus my efforts and get rid of some stuff that 00:00:59.220 --> 00:01:03.350 fundamentally is not something I really care so much about. 00:01:03.350 --> 00:01:09.400 Even if you come up with a vision and so with a smaller scope of things that you want to 00:01:09.400 --> 00:01:17.150 do, even then, you have to take this ambition of yours, this vision, and disassemble it 00:01:17.150 --> 00:01:19.310 in very small steps. 00:01:19.310 --> 00:01:28.950 Org Mode is very good at taking care of this because you can keep track of TODOs in Org 00:01:28.950 --> 00:01:29.950 Mode. 00:01:29.950 --> 00:01:36.740 So let me show you how I keep an agenda that also keeps track of my vision. 00:01:36.740 --> 00:01:40.250 For this talk, I have a running example. 00:01:40.250 --> 00:01:42.990 Vision will be "I want to bring joy to people." 00:01:42.990 --> 00:01:45.730 and "I want to live in synergy with the planet." 00:01:45.730 --> 00:01:49.740 Okay, so, given these two visions, let's open the agenda. 00:01:49.740 --> 00:01:59.560 You will see on the right that now I have some tasks, both on Tuesday and on Friday. 00:01:59.560 --> 00:02:04.560 Things to notice is that we said one of our visions is synergy with the planet, so some 00:02:04.560 --> 00:02:13.010 tasks are annotated on the left with this category and some with "Bring joy to people." 00:02:13.010 --> 00:02:16.730 In this way, you can distinguish where are my... 00:02:16.730 --> 00:02:20.100 In this day, where my effort is going in this day. 00:02:20.100 --> 00:02:27.950 The other thing is the specification of these tasks, and then at the end, you can notice 00:02:27.950 --> 00:02:42.690 a tag on the right that is essentially a guess of how long this task will have an effect 00:02:42.690 --> 00:02:43.750 over the future. 00:02:43.750 --> 00:02:53.970 So, for example, installing solar panel onto my roof is going to have an effect of 10 years 00:02:53.970 --> 00:02:57.180 over my life, if I manage to achieve that. 00:02:57.180 --> 00:03:01.230 That is my rough guess. 00:03:01.230 --> 00:03:08.180 You will notice that the ones that have a bigger amount, so 10 years over the 5 year 00:03:08.180 --> 00:03:15.879 one, because I order my day so that the tasks that are more important or that I believe 00:03:15.879 --> 00:03:21.540 are more effective over my future, I sort them so that they appear at the top. 00:03:21.540 --> 00:03:26.420 In this way, I can basically decide, okay, today, what should I... 00:03:26.420 --> 00:03:36.379 Find a video on Youtube, but I should take into consideration when I look at my agenda 00:03:36.379 --> 00:03:42.379 that I've traded that small fun for today with something that could have had an effect 00:03:42.379 --> 00:03:45.890 over a longer period of time. 00:03:45.890 --> 00:04:03.909 Let me show you how I also exploit the facilities that Org Mode comes with. 00:04:03.909 --> 00:04:05.190 I will... 00:04:05.190 --> 00:04:07.830 I have two templates available to me. 00:04:07.830 --> 00:04:09.330 I will choose one. 00:04:09.330 --> 00:04:13.970 The first thing that it asks to me is "How long will this affect your life?" 00:04:13.970 --> 00:04:20.660 So I like ... It will affect a long time, if I manage to produce only for myself. 00:04:20.660 --> 00:04:23.400 So I choose 10 years. 00:04:23.400 --> 00:04:24.750 And then I specify the task. 00:04:24.750 --> 00:04:29.080 So, "Learn how to keep bees." 00:04:29.080 --> 00:04:30.080 I collect this task. 00:04:30.080 --> 00:04:35.870 It will now appear in the middle because 10 years is between 20 years and 5 years. 00:04:35.870 --> 00:04:40.860 So I know that if I put some effort in learning how to keep bees, I should be quite happy 00:04:40.860 --> 00:04:41.979 for today. 00:04:41.979 --> 00:04:43.060 Okay. 00:04:43.060 --> 00:04:50.470 So, say that I do it, say that that's it... 00:04:50.470 --> 00:04:52.490 Once I've done this task, how can I be... 00:04:52.490 --> 00:04:58.000 How do I know how much progress I am doing? 00:04:58.000 --> 00:05:07.100 The way I can do that is by retrospecting weekly or monthly about the successes or the 00:05:07.100 --> 00:05:09.520 progress that I am doing. 00:05:09.520 --> 00:05:14.949 How I do it is simply by running this kind of snippet that shows me that for this month, 00:05:14.949 --> 00:05:23.350 I have done three tasks for bringing joy to people and three tasks for synergy with planet. 00:05:23.350 --> 00:05:30.300 This is useful because you can repeat it and it will be appended, so every time you run 00:05:30.300 --> 00:05:38.040 it again, you can compare if you are... how you are working towards your goal and if you're 00:05:38.040 --> 00:05:43.830 focusing more on bringing joy to people or if you're focusing more on synergy. 00:05:43.830 --> 00:05:45.990 Balance the effort. 00:05:45.990 --> 00:05:51.850 A thing that I want to share that I think will be useful to you is this function I use 00:05:51.850 --> 00:05:55.789 that I made for myself to create these statistics. 00:05:55.789 --> 00:06:04.509 It's a wrapper around the very enjoyable library org-ql, which allows you to query and group 00:06:04.509 --> 00:06:13.650 headings, do analysis on headings, or restructuring and view headings in a SQL fashion. 00:06:13.650 --> 00:06:19.120 The syntax is very similar to SQL. 00:06:19.120 --> 00:06:25.390 You can manipulate your headings and visualize them or just get statistics as I have done 00:06:25.390 --> 00:06:26.390 here. 00:06:26.390 --> 00:06:36.540 Finally, for this talk, say that you are doing progress, that progress most likely will generate 00:06:36.540 --> 00:06:39.950 some useful knowledge for yourself. 00:06:39.950 --> 00:06:46.050 My way to store this knowledge is through org-roam, another interesting mode that is 00:06:46.050 --> 00:06:54.759 very... that is becoming very relevant and known today. 00:06:54.759 --> 00:06:56.020 The idea is that I simply... 00:06:56.020 --> 00:07:08.470 If I learn how to make, how to install solar panels, that can be useful knowledge. 00:07:08.470 --> 00:07:15.800 I can link to some other knowledge that I have and so create my own knowledgebase, and 00:07:15.800 --> 00:07:19.020 save it for later use. 00:07:19.020 --> 00:07:25.160 My later use is typically, in this case, my blog. 00:07:25.160 --> 00:07:31.630 In here, I have a few notes that are basically a synthesis of knowledge that I have collected 00:07:31.630 --> 00:07:34.550 doing my tasks towards my vision. 00:07:34.550 --> 00:07:39.440 With this, this is all I wanted to show you for this talk. 00:07:39.440 --> 00:07:47.490 You can follow me on my blog at https://ag91.github.io . That is also where I am going to share a 00:07:47.490 --> 00:07:55.370 version of this Org Mode file that allows you basically to create the same kind of configuration 00:07:55.370 --> 00:08:02.950 I have here, and you can create an instance by running this snippet of Emacs in which 00:08:02.950 --> 00:08:04.790 you can just run this example. 00:08:04.790 --> 00:08:11.890 An extended example I will also add, to just play around safely with this kind of configuration. 00:08:11.890 --> 00:08:13.300 So enjoy the rest of the conference. 00:08:13.300 --> 00:08:14.460 Catch you later! 00:08:14.460 --> 00:08:15.650 Nice to meet you!