Solving for Pattern

This blog entry is part of a continuing series on GTD with Emacs. Thus far I have discussed the following components of my Getting Things Done setup: Emacs, Calendar and Diary, Muse and Blosxom. In this entry I discuss two essential components of GTD with Emacs: Planner and Remember. According to John Wiegley, the developer of Emacs Planner Mode, Planner can be used

Remember, also by John Wiegley, is "a mode for quickly jotting down things to remember," and is designed for use with Planner. Planner, in turn, is designed for use with Muse. In addition, Planner can be used with Calendar and Diary. Together, all of these components constitute a GTD software suite, that is powerful, extensible, customizable, and free. A manual is available for Planner, and setup is straightforward. Here are the relevant portions of my Preferences.el file (you may recall from earlier posts that I use Aquamacs):

In my view, the essence of GTD is to empty your mind, so that whatever it is you are doing in the moment receives the full attention of an uncluttered mind. To this end, David Allen’s GTD guides you in the creation of a trustworthy system for managing all your "stuff" — memos, letters, emails, articles, notes, messages, tasks, meetings, etc. Once such a system is in place, you can focus on the present task ("action" in GTD parlance) with an empty mind (see, for example, Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shambala, 1970/2006). In this way, it can be seen that GTD boils down to this: A trustworthy system that helps create an empty mind for acting in the present.

A trustworthy GTD system is based on The Five Phases of Workflow Mastery (for a nice summary, see David Allen, Ready for Anything, pp. 157-159):

/docs/gtd | permanent link

This post continues my series on Getting Things Done and GTD with Emacs. It features two additional components of my GTD with Emacs setup: Muse and blosxom. According to the author of Muse, Michael Olson,

Muse can publish documents in several formats, including some which I use regularly: Blosxom, HTML, LaTeX, PDF. Muse can be used to create a wide variety of documents, including web pages, slides, lecture notes, documents with citations, blog entries, journals, and plan pages (in conjunction with Planner). Emacs Muse makes it easy to "Get Things Done" for two reasons: (a) it provides an intuitive and easy-to-use authoring environment specially suited for "wiki-like" documents, and (b) the user can use a single authoring environment to publish documents in a wide variety of formats. For example, when I am done with this post, I can save it as a muse file for further editing and revision; publish it as blosxom file for uploading to my blog; and publish it as pdf file if I choose to create an archive of my blogs.

The Muse manual is a good one, although there were a couple of times when I found it useful to look at Michael Olson’s Emacs settings. These are available as part of the Muse download, in the "examples" folder. Here is the Muse section of my Preferences.el file:

Those lines that begin with ";;" are comments, and won’t be processed by Emacs during startup. As you can see, Muse is modular, and you only need to load those modules that you will actually use. Managing a startup file such as .emacs or Preferences.el will seem strange to Emacs newcomers. However, you can "borrow" segments from other users, which eases the learning curve substantially. In fact, the widespread and good natured sharing of Emacs setups and solutions is one of the most powerful aspects of GTD with Emacs.

Today’s post is a continuation of my series on Getting Things Done (GTD); it is next in sequence after my post on GTD with Emacs. (Note that you can see the entire GTD series, and only the GTD series, by clicking on the "gtd" at the bottom of any GTD post, including this one.) Once you have Emacs installed on your computer, setting up Emacs Calendar and Diary is the next logical step towards a complete GTD with Emacs setup. There is no need to download any files, everything is included as part of the Emacs distribution. However, there is some customization you will want to do. There are several good sources of information about the Calendar and Diary, including the following:

The first two are "must haves." Whether or not you buy the manual is a matter of taste: Do you prefer hard copy or digital copy? I own all three, but good books are my passion. One of them, I forget which, comes with a nice "GNU Emacs Reference Card." There are also numerous Emacs "Cheat Sheets" online—just Google "Emacs Cheat Sheet" and you will have access to several. Anyhow, back to Calendar and Diary.

There are two ways to start the Calendar: Issue the keystroke command "M-x calendar" ("alt-x calendar" on my G4) or put the following command in your Preferences.el file:

When Emacs starts up, it executes all of the commands in your .emacs file, or if you are running Aquamacs like me, all the commands in your Preferences.el file. By including "(calendar)" in Preferences.el, the Calendar will be loaded automatically when you start Emacs. My Preferences.el is in the following directory:

These commands make it possible to see your diary entries in a useful format. In order to see fancy diary display, put the cursor on a selected date, and type, for example, "1 4 d" — this will produce a two-week window on your diary (or appointment book). If you want to enter an appointment in your diary, you select the appropriate date in the Calendar, and then type "i d" — it couldn’t be easier. All of this is explained and illustrated in the resources given above. I make a pdf of my two-week calendar every few days and upload it to my home page for colleagues and students to access if they want to schedule a meeting, or see what I am up to.

You can make all kinds of entries in your diary, including yearly events such as birthdays and anniversaries, monthly events such as due dates for certain bills, and weekly events such as meetings and classes. Entries can be associated with a certain time (10-11 am), or may just be something that has to be done on that day. Further, entries can run across several days, such as a trip or a workshop. In short, you can do anything in Emacs that can be done in other calendar programs, such as Outlook or Sunbird.

The beauty of Emacs Calendar/Diary is that you can do all of this in the same application—Emacs—that is your computer workbench. I regularly leave Emacs for only one of two purposes: to browse the web using Camino, or to view a document using Skim. Otherwise, when I am on my computer, I am almost always working in Emacs (as I am right this minute, using Emacs Muse). And, of course, Emacs Calendar/Diary is a key component of the GTD with Emacs setup, and Emacs Calendar/Diary integrates effectively with Planner, which is the core GTD component.

I have used emacs for quite some time now—about two decades—as a text editor, mostly to edit LaTeX source files, but also to do some statistical programming. Emacs comes in several flavors, and the flavor I use on my PowerBook G4 is Aquamacs, a version of emacs specially tailored for Macs. As I was ramping up to implement GTD (see my post Getting Things Done), I came across a blog entry (credmp, see below) that made me think about making emacs the core of my GTD action management system. Here is a fairly complete listing of resources for setting up GTD with emacs:

GTD with emacs is not for everyone. First, it is not even necessary to use a computer to implement a GTD action management system. It can easily and productively be done using manilla folders, ordinary paper, and a pencil, a "low-tech" approach that would make Wendell Berry proud (see, for example, The Mormon Worker: Wendell Berry’s "Gift of a Good Life"). Second, even if one does use a computer, it is not necessary to use emacs. There are other ways (see my post Getting Things Done).

GTD with emacs is for geeks. It really only makes sense if you already use emacs, or could make good use of it in the future. That said, GTD with emacs is a beautiful thing. It is solving for pattern (see my post Wendell Berry: Solving for Pattern). GTD with emacs is effective for two reasons. First, emacs itself is such a great work environment. Second, there are several add-on modules (called "modes," in emacs-speak) that extend emacs in useful ways. Two of the most relevant for GTD are Planner and Org. In subsequent posts I will be describing my setup in terms of each component (muse, planner, etc) and how that component contributes to GTD. In the remainder of this post I describe the virtues of emacs, which I see as the following:

I could go on, but you get the idea. Emacs is a special "product," and one that everbody should consider using. From the standpoint of GTD and HIP (see my post GTD is HIP), emacs is analogous to "working memory," the workbench of your daily computer activity.

There are some striking parallels between David Allen’s GTD action management system and the Human Information Processing (HIP) system described by cognitive scientists. A worthy description of HIP can be found as part of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Human Factors Awareness Course. Embedded within this extensive online course is a cognition training module that is quite good. This training module is based on C. D. Wickens, Engineering Psychology and Human Performance (Harper Collins, New York, 1992), and is oriented towards man-machine interfaces. However, the cognitive description is self-contained and works well as a general introduction to HIP.

HIP can be viewed as having four components: input, storage, processing, and output. I will briefly describe each of these, and indicate some parallels with GTD.

A final note is this: HIP is what makes GTD possible, but GTD is designed to improve the efficacy of HIP. This means that GTD and HIP are involved in a series of cybernetic feedback loops—and improving the cybernetics of HIP and/or GTD is a matter of Solving for Pattern (see my post Wendell Berry: Solving for Pattern).

I have been a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done "action management" system for about two years now, although I am only now getting serious about implementing GTD in my own life. In fact, I am writing this upcoming series of posts as a way to clarify my own thinking about GTD, and also to document this process for my own and others’ future reference (see my Why Blog? post). This initial post is a brief overview of GTD resources. The place to start is David Allen’s own books:

Making It All Work has yet to appear, so I cannot speak for it. Getting Things Done is the book that Got It All Started, but Ready for Anything is my favorite. Getting Things Done contains too much detail for my taste, whereas Ready for Anything is written in bite size chunks, at just the right level of principle and practice. This, by the way, is just the balance I hope to achieve in this blog.

In addition to David Allen’s books, there are lots of resources available on the web. Here are some of the best:

These eight are sufficient to get you started; they will lead you to hundreds of others.

In the next several posts I will share some of my insights about GTD, and my GTD setup, which is based on GNU emacs.

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Blinks

GTD with Emacs: Planner and Remember

GTD with Emacs: Muse and blosxom

GTD with Emacs: Calendar and Diary

GTD with Emacs

GTD is HIP

Getting Things Done