Manage your everything using org-mode

org-mode?

org-mode is an Emacs extension created by Carsten Dominik for keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, planning projects, and authoring documents with a fast and effective plain-text system. Like Emacs itself, org-mode can do a lot. And there are people who push org-mode to its limits and beyond. I’m just not one of them.

Admittedly, org-mode is overkill for just managing your tasks. But task management is a good gateway into using org-mode to organize yourself in plain text.

A word of warning: what I’m going to discuss in this post might draw the ire of some org-mode purists or power users out there. So be it. This is the way I do things, and if that doesn’t mesh with the way they do things, then the problem doesn’t lie with me.

Setting Up Your Task List

Create a set of headings for the week — Monday to Friday — by typing an asterisk, followed by the day of the week. Press CTRL+Enter to add a new heading.
So, you have a task list. Now what? You might want to assign a priority to your tasks. org-mode has three priorities: A, B, and C — most important to least important. B, in case you’re wondering, is the default priority.

Assign a priority to a task by clicking on it, then pressing SHIFT-up arrow (S-up in Emacs speak) on your keyboard. Remember that B is the default priority, so you’ll need to press that combination of keys to cycle through them to find the priority that you want.

Finally, you’ll wind up with something that looks like this:

Synchronize your task list

One weakness of org-mode is that your documents are stuck on your hard drive. There are a few mobile apps that claim to work with org-mode, but the only one that’s worked for me is Orgzly . I can drop by org-mode files into a synced folder in Dropbox, and then Orgzly picks them up. Here’s what the task list I created looks like in Orgzly