Org for GTD and other Task managment systems

Org-mode is flexible enough to implement many different ways of organizing your projects. A frequently discusses scheme is David Allen's strategy for Getting Things Done. But it is clearly not the only way to us Org-mode for planning. Here are a couple of links related to this topic.

• Nicolas Petton has written a post on his setup of Orgmode for GTD.
• John Wiegley has written an excellent document describing his way of using Org-mode as a day planner. See also some later messages for enhancements of his setup: emacs-orgmode-2962, emacs-orgmode-3629
• Charles Cave has written an article/tutorial about the basic elements of GTD and how he implements them in Org-mode. There is also a french translation of this document.
  • More recently, Charles Cave has written another tutorial on his GTD workflow in org-mode, which includes a nice section on effort estimates and custom agenda commands for GTD.
• There have been several threads on emacs-orgmode@gnu.org related to GTD, the most important ones are:
  • Another GTD question, which contains a discussion about GTD and org-mode.
  • In the same thread, there is a post by Carsten summarizing several options for implementing GTD in org-mode.
  • GTD, Projects and Next Actions in org-mode is a thread where several people describe their personal setup.
  • The SOMEDAY/MAYBE vs. low priorities thread contains a discussion about priorities that is quite instructive.
  • Here is a very instructive post by Pete Phillips explaining why David Allen's book is the best place to start learning GTD and that the Internet and Org-mode should only come into the game later, when you start thinking about the implementation. And since doing GTD the right way will give you lots of free time, don't forget to listen to Pete's music!
• Also on the web you can find information about how people are setting up Org-mode to fit their habits. A few examples:
  • This blog post shows a very simple and clear GTD setup.
• This tutorial on custom agenda commands offers a few examples of how to make GTD reviews easier using custom agenda searches.

Pomodoro is a time management technique. In this thread, Frédéric Couchet describes how he uses Org for Pomodoro:

I always start a clock when I work on a task. And for the Pomodoro
technique I use also the org-timer module with some configuration.

Activate the org-timer module :

(add-to-list 'org-modules 'org-timer)

Set a default value for the timer, for example :

(setq org-timer-default-timer 25)

Modify the org-clock-in so that a timer is started with the default
value except if a timer is already started :

(add-hook 'org-clock-in-hook (lambda ()
      (if (not org-timer-current-timer)
      (org-timer-set-timer '(16)))))