path: root/2020/subtitles/emacsconf-2020--10-lead-your-future-with-org--andrea.sbv

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Welcome to my talk, Lead Your Future with
Org.

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Who am I?

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I'm Andrea.

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I work as a Scala software engineer somewhere
in the Netherlands, and I inherited my passion

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for Emacs from my PhD supervisor.

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From that moment on, I got in synergy with
it.

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You can find more about me and my interests
at https://ag91.github.io.

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That is the place where I keep my blog and
I blog on a weekly basis.

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Let's get into the bulk of the talk.

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Why I needed a vision.

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The main, main problem is that I have too
many interests.

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I like a lot of things, and these things take
time.

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Then I have too little time to do other things
that are very important as well.

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And so I need priority.

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And the vision in my mind is both an ambition,
something that I want to do with my life,

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and at the same time, it's a way to focus
my efforts and get rid of some stuff that

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fundamentally is not something I really care
so much about.

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Even if you come up with a vision and so with
a smaller scope of things that you want to

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do, even then, you have to take this ambition
of yours, this vision, and disassemble it

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in very small steps.

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Org Mode is very good at taking care of this
because you can keep track of TODOs in Org

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Mode.

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So let me show you how I keep an agenda that
also keeps track of my vision.

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For this talk, I have a running example.

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Vision will be "I want to bring joy to people."

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and "I want to live in synergy with the planet."

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Okay, so, given these two visions, let's open
the agenda.

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You will see on the right that now I have
some tasks, both on Tuesday and on Friday.

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Things to notice is that we said one of our
visions is synergy with the planet, so some

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tasks are annotated on the left with this
category and some with "Bring joy to people."

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In this way, you can distinguish where are
my...

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In this day, where my effort is going in this
day.

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The other thing is the specification of these
tasks, and then at the end, you can notice

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a tag on the right that is essentially a guess
of how long this task will have an effect

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over the future.

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So, for example, installing solar panel onto
my roof is going to have an effect of 10 years

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over my life, if I manage to achieve that.

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That is my rough guess.

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You will notice that the ones that have a
bigger amount, so 10 years over the 5 year

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one, because I order my day so that the tasks
that are more important or that I believe

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are more effective over my future, I sort
them so that they appear at the top.

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In this way, I can basically decide, okay,
today, what should I...

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Find a video on Youtube, but I should take
into consideration when I look at my agenda

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that I've traded that small fun for today
with something that could have had an effect

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over a longer period of time.

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Let me show you how I also exploit the facilities
that Org Mode comes with.

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I will...

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I have two templates available to me.

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I will choose one.

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The first thing that it asks to me is "How
long will this affect your life?"

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So I like ... It will affect a long time,
if I manage to produce only for myself.

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So I choose 10 years.

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And then I specify the task.

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So, "Learn how to keep bees."

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I collect this task.

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It will now appear in the middle because 10
years is between 20 years and 5 years.

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So I know that if I put some effort in learning
how to keep bees, I should be quite happy

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for today.

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Okay.

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So, say that I do it, say that that's it...

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Once I've done this task, how can I be...

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How do I know how much progress I am doing?

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The way I can do that is by retrospecting
weekly or monthly about the successes or the

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progress that I am doing.

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How I do it is simply by running this kind
of snippet that shows me that for this month,

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I have done three tasks for bringing joy to
people and three tasks for synergy with planet.

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This is useful because you can repeat it and
it will be appended, so every time you run

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it again, you can compare if you are... how
you are working towards your goal and if you're

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focusing more on bringing joy to people or
if you're focusing more on synergy.

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Balance the effort.

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A thing that I want to share that I think
will be useful to you is this function I use

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that I made for myself to create these statistics.

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It's a wrapper around the very enjoyable library
org-ql, which allows you to query and group

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headings, do analysis on headings, or restructuring
and view headings in a SQL fashion.

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The syntax is very similar to SQL.

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You can manipulate your headings and visualize
them or just get statistics as I have done

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here.

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Finally, for this talk, say that you are doing
progress, that progress most likely will generate

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some useful knowledge for yourself.

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My way to store this knowledge is through
org-roam, another interesting mode that is

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very... that is becoming very relevant and
known today.

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The idea is that I simply...

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If I learn how to make, how to install solar
panels, that can be useful knowledge.

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I can link to some other knowledge that I
have and so create my own knowledgebase, and

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save it for later use.

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My later use is typically, in this case, my
blog.

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In here, I have a few notes that are basically
a synthesis of knowledge that I have collected

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doing my tasks towards my vision.

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With this, this is all I wanted to show you
for this talk.

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You can follow me on my blog at https://ag91.github.io
. That is also where I am going to share a

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version of this Org Mode file that allows
you basically to create the same kind of configuration

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I have here, and you can create an instance
by running this snippet of Emacs in which

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you can just run this example.

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An extended example I will also add, to just
play around safely with this kind of configuration.

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So enjoy the rest of the conference.

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Catch you later!

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Nice to meet you!