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# Lead your future with Org
Andrea
[[!template id=vid src="https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/emacsconf/2020/emacsconf-2020--10-lead-your-future-with-org--andrea.webm" subtitles="/2020/subtitles/emacsconf-2020--10-lead-your-future-with-org--andrea.vtt"]]
[Download compressed .webm video (10.5M)](https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/emacsconf/2020/smaller/emacsconf-2020--10-lead-your-future-with-org--andrea--vp9-q56-video-original-audio.webm)
[View transcript](#transcript)
The world is full of possibilities. A person life is rather short
though, and one can easily end up carry on without focus.
In this short talk I want to share how Org mode empowers me into
organizing and monitoring my tasks to make sure I am working towards
achieving my vision.
The emphasis of the talk is on defining a direction, monitoring the
progress towards your planned destination, and keeping a trail of your
actions to review and set up a healthy feedback loop.
Tools for the job that I will (at least) mention: Org files, Org
agenda, Org archive, org-ql, and Org-roam.
<!-- from the pad --->
- Actual start and end time (EST): Start 2020-11-28T13.17.07; End:
2020-11-28T13.25.25
# Questions
## For how many years have you used Org?
7ish. I started during my PhD because it was the easiest to fit
in. And programming in OCaml was so nice in there :)
# Notes
- Andrea: I will reply questions inline, and you can reach me on IRC
(username: \`andrea)
- Tagging tasks with tags like 10yr, 5yr (how many days that task will
have impact on life / future).
- The table-like weekly reviews may also be produced with org-ql
dynamic blocks: <https://github.com/alphapapa/org-ql#dynamic-block>
- Blog: <https://ag91.github.io>
- <https://ag91.github.io/blog/2020/09/27/org-agenda-and-your-future-or-how-to-keep-score-of-your-long-term-goals-with-org-mode/>
<a name="transcript"></a>
# Transcript
Welcome to my talk, Lead Your Future with Org. Who am I? I'm Andrea. I
work as a Scala software engineer somewhere in the Netherlands, and I
inherited my passion for Emacs from my PhD supervisor. From that
moment on, I got in synergy with it. You can find more about me and my
interests at https://ag91.github.io. That is the place where I keep my
blog and I blog on a weekly basis. Let's get into the bulk of the
talk.
Why I needed a vision. The main, main problem is that I have too many
interests. I like a lot of things, and these things take time. Then I
have too little time to do other things that are very important as
well. And so I need priority. And the vision in my mind is both an
ambition, something that I want to do with my life, and at the same
time, it's a way to focus my efforts and get rid of some stuff that
fundamentally is not something I really care so much about. Even if
you come up with a vision and so with a smaller scope of things that
you want to do, even then, you have to take this ambition of yours,
this vision, and disassemble it in very small steps. Org Mode is very
good at taking care of this because you can keep track of TODOs in Org
Mode.
So let me show you how I keep an agenda that also keeps track of my
vision. For this talk, I have a running example. Vision will be "I
want to bring joy to people." and "I want to live in synergy with the
planet." Okay, so, given these two visions, let's open the agenda. You
will see on the right that now I have some tasks, both on Tuesday and
on Friday. Things to notice is that we said one of our visions is
synergy with the planet, so some tasks are annotated on the left with
this category and some with "Bring joy to people." In this way, you
can distinguish where are my... In this day, where my effort is going
in this day.
The other thing is the specification of these tasks, and then at the
end, you can notice a tag on the right that is essentially a guess of
how long this task will have an effect over the future. So, for
example, installing solar panel onto my roof is going to have an
effect of 10 years over my life, if I manage to achieve that. That is
my rough guess. You will notice that the ones that have a bigger
amount, so 10 years over the 5 year one, because I order my day so
that the tasks that are more important or that I believe are more
effective over my future, I sort them so that they appear at the top.
In this way, I can basically decide, okay, today, what should I...
Find a video on Youtube, but I should take into consideration when I
look at my agenda that I've traded that small fun for today with
something that could have had an effect over a longer period of time.
Let me show you how I also exploit the facilities that Org Mode comes
with. I will... I have two templates available to me. I will choose
one. The first thing that it asks to me is "How long will this affect
your life?" So I like ... It will affect a long time, if I manage to
produce only for myself. So I choose 10 years. And then I specify the
task. So, "Learn how to keep bees." I collect this task. It will now
appear in the middle because 10 years is between 20 years and 5 years.
So I know that if I put some effort in learning how to keep bees, I
should be quite happy for today. Okay. So, say that I do it, say that
that's it... Once I've done this task, how can I be...
How do I know how much progress I am doing? The way I can do that is
by retrospecting weekly or monthly about the successes or the progress
that I am doing. How I do it is simply by running this kind of snippet
that shows me that for this month, I have done three tasks for
bringing joy to people and three tasks for synergy with planet. This
is useful because you can repeat it and it will be appended, so every
time you run it again, you can compare if you are... how you are
working towards your goal and if you're focusing more on bringing joy
to people or if you're focusing more on synergy. Balance the effort.
A thing that I want to share that I think will be useful to you is
this function I use that I made for myself to create these statistics.
It's a wrapper around the very enjoyable library org-ql, which allows
you to query and group headings, do analysis on headings, or
restructuring and view headings in a SQL fashion. The syntax is very
similar to SQL. You can manipulate your headings and visualize them or
just get statistics as I have done here.
Finally, for this talk, say that you are doing progress, that progress
most likely will generate some useful knowledge for yourself. My way
to store this knowledge is through org-roam, another interesting mode
that is very... that is becoming very relevant and known today. The
idea is that I simply... If I learn how to make, how to install solar
panels, that can be useful knowledge. I can link to some other
knowledge that I have and so create my own knowledgebase, and save it
for later use. My later use is typically, in this case, my blog. In
here, I have a few notes that are basically a synthesis of knowledge
that I have collected doing my tasks towards my vision.
With this, this is all I wanted to show you for this talk. You can
follow me on my blog at https://ag91.github.io . That is also where I
am going to share a version of this Org Mode file that allows you
basically to create the same kind of configuration I have here, and
you can create an instance by running this snippet of Emacs in which
you can just run this example. An extended example I will also add, to
just play around safely with this kind of configuration. So enjoy the
rest of the conference. Catch you later! Nice to meet you!
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