path: root/2021/captions/emacsconf-2021-professional--using-org-mode-for-recording-continuous-professional-development--philip-beadling--main.vtt

WEBVTT

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Hello everyone! My name is Philip Beadling.

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Just to give you a bit of background,

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I'm the enterprise architect

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in a company called Quantile Technologies.

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I've been using Emacs

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certainly for the last four or five years

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as part of my day-to-day workflow,

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but I've used it on and off

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for the last 20 years

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depending on the jobs

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or the task at hand.

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Now, today I'm here in a personal capacity

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to talk about a use I had

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for Emacs last year

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where I had to record

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my continuous professional development,

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and I was required to be audited

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by my professional body on it.

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My CPD record is a bit of a mess,

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or certainly was. It was over

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various different services and systems

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that have been provided to me

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by previous employers.

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And, I had bits of it in Excel spreadsheets,

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and I was looking for like

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a one single golden source

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where I could store it all

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and use in the future.

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So, I had a look online.

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I didn't find anything I'd like,

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so I decided I would use Emacs,

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and I quickly came to the conclusion

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that using Org mode

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was a nice fit for this,

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you know, both the TODO lists

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and the properties

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seem to fit nicely

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with building a very basic database,

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which is what in effect this is,

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what this is.

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Without further ado,

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I will start by just downloading.

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This is available on my public Git,

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handle is falloutfill,

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and it's under a project called Misc.

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It's just a single file called cpd.org,

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I can stick that in the chat

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when we actually do this live,

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so that people will have a link to it.

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So, I'll start this up.

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Okay. To start with, I am just going to

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close down various Lisp stuff,

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and just give you a demo of

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how it actually works.

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Let's go up here.

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Okay, so, basically to make this work,

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the way I subdivide it

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is that I would have

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professional goals,

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and professional goals

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would be made up of activities,

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and each of those activities

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would contribute to the goal.

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So, in order to represent this,

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this is just a nested TODO list

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in Emacs Org mode.

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I sort of change things like the naming,

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Pending, In-Progress and Complete

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rather than TODO, DONE because

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that's more like what my professional

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body likes to categorize things,

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but essentially it's the same thing.

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So, I've got an Org capture template

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or two Org capture templates

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in order to grab this information,

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and then stick it in the TODO list,

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and also tabulate it using column view.

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I'll start off just by showing you

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an example here.

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So, what I'm going to do is

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create a new goal,

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and then under it,

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I will create a couple of activities

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relevant to that goal.

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For the goal I'm going to have, let's say,

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something relevant,

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so, 'Improve Public Speaking',

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and then I'm going to say, the type

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of that goal is, well, it's a 'Presentation'

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I suppose. The outcome of that goal is,

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well, I don't want to go into too much

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detail here, but it would be, you know,

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'Get feedback from colleagues', and so forth.

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I won't fully and completely [inaudible]

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about what the goal was.

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Now, the retrospective value,

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my understanding is that

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you fill that in afterwards,

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so you want to talk after completing the

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action, so this is not relevant for the day.

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I'm just going to leave it blank,

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although I'm sure you can imagine

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I could say: having completed this action

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I felt that, blah blah blah, and so forth.

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Okay, so I will add that, and then you

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will see that I now have a new goal,

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both in my column view and in my TODO list,

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and just to make it a little bit

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realistic, I'm going to then add two

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activities to that.

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When I come in to add an activity,

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I have to select a goal.

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I'm going to select 'Improve Public Speaking'.

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Yeah, so, the activity I'm going to say is,

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well, let's say, 'Speak at EmacsConf 2021',

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that we can use a type of 'Presentation',

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outcome of that is, stating the obvious,

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'Present on an Emacs idea'.

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Right, something along the lines of that.

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And, then retrospective, again I'm not

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going to fill that in at the moment.

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Then, last but not least,

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I will come up with a slightly different

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activity. So, again selecting

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'Improve Public Speaking',

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the activity would be

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'Watch lecture series on public speaking',

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you know, blah blah blah, so forth.

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Type value would be

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Lecture, for this outcome would maybe be

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'Use new knowledge in EmacsConf presentation'.

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Right, might be a good one there.

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Again, retrospective value,

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I'm just going to leave that blank,

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and I'm going to save that.

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Now, we're in a position where we've got

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a goal and two activities, which are

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represented here, you can see here that I

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can move an activity, cycle it forward to

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In-Progress. When I do that,

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I get a STARTED timestamp here.

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If I then cycle it again,

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I get the more familiar CLOSED timestamp here.

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The STARTED timestamp is a bit of

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custom code, I'll show you that in a moment.

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And then likewise, let's say that…,

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we'll move this one from PENDING to STARTED.

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Okay. Now, if I save the document,

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that will trigger the updating

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of the column view, you can see now

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that we have the various started and

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completed statuses, this is up to date.

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So, that's pretty much.

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You can imagine that we could add

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lots of goals and lots of activities,

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and this would grow into, you know,

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several sheets worth of a work,

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and then last but not least,

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is obviously the most important thing.

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How do you submit it?

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We could just use the standard

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export facility in Org mode for doing that.

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That's just Control c Control e l o (C-c C-e l o).

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And there you can see, 

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there you've got the goals and activities.

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I spent a bit of time, I won't go too much

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in the LaTeX formatting, but coming up

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with something that I felt and got as

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much information compactly on a page

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without making it difficult to read,

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should we say, and it's always 

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a find-the-balance thing. 

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I'm not saying I'm an expert on it, 

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but I thought what I came up with here

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was reasonably clear

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but allowed you to write enough information.

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The goals and activities were reasonably

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well explained.

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Okay, we can just kill that.

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So, how does all of that work?

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Well, underneath is config tab here,

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we have a bunch of Lisp

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that I'm going to sort of fly through here.

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You can ask me any questions afterwards.

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First thing is,

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we have the org-capture templates,

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which are here.

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The goal one is not doing anything special.

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It's just writing it back to this file,

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so there is a limitation there

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that you must have this file open

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when you add them, which is

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something I'd like to improve in future.

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For the activities, it specifies the file,

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but it also specifies this function

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set-activity-pos-from-goal, which (is) above here.

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What this does is, it iterates through the

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various Org entries looking for goals,

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and once it has a list of goals, 

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it presents them to you

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using ido-completing-read,

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so that you can select the goal 

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that you want the activity to live underneath,

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and it then searches forward, and it finds

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the appropriate spot in that goal 

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that the Emacs can then dump

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the captured activity.

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Okay, the next one is pretty straightforward.

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Because I changed the names 

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of the TODO, DONE, 

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I now need a new way of aggregating

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the summary completion statuses.

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So, for this I'm just looking 

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at the number of completed activities

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over the total number of activities,

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and I make that available on the C+ here,

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which we will see when I go and show you

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the top configuration in the Org document

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in two minutes.

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I mentioned that we needed to have our

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own start date. The way this works is 

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we add a hook to

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org-after-todo-state-change-hook,

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which means that we test 

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the state change results in

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one of the items being In-Progress, 

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and if that's true 

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and it already doesn't have a time stamp,

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then it creates a timestamp 

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with the current time and date.

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The second hook here is just ensuring that

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when we save the document,

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that the column view is dynamically updated,

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so that everything is up to date.

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And then last but not least here,

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the tmp-f-timestamp, what this does is,

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on the export, it modifies the timestamps,

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so that it removes the angle brackets,

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and it removes the hours and minutes.

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That is a space-saving thing 

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and a tidiness thing in the PDF.

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I'll show you in a second how that's used.

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We then allow bind-keywords.

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We use them above.

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Then we just have a simple key 

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that allows us to hotkey for org-capture.

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And then at the start, 

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when we evaluate the startup block

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that I have of Lisp, 

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just so it's already there,

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and set the number of sublevels to one

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so only the top levels exist.

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Coming back over the top 

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to put that all back together again.

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The startup just tells you 

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that you want log times.

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The title, author, description, and…,

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they should be obvious, right,

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that's just text for the PDF.

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Options, we disable the table of contents,

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we do not want that.

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Now, the output config here, 

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the first two are resulting 

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in the timestamp formats, so, that was

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the tmp-f-timestamp function

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I showed you below.

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And, we got a better LaTeX stuff here,

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just saying that we want a landscape,

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and we want to use A4 paper size,

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and then the columns here.

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What we want is just to 

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rename the properties 

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to something which just looks

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a little bit nicer in the table.

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So you can see that: goals, activities,

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status, completed, and so forth.

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Then last but not least, 

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on the actual thing, 

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we use a longtable in LaTeX.

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We align, so we specify very exactly

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that we want five centimeters

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for the first and last two columns,

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and that we want all the other columns 

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to use the remaining space.

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And that's it.

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Appreciate, I've absolutely whirlwinded

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through that, but please do feel free

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to ask me any questions,

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or speak to me offline.

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Thank you very much.