How do you go about your daily organization? | Hacker News Reader

How do you go about your daily organization?

9 pointsjohannesjo6 comments

I'm wondering how other programmers go about their daily task organization. Do you use just pen & paper to write down your to do's for the day or do you use software for that? What about time tracking? Are there any tools you can recommend?

Personally I tend to get carried away with a task from time to time and spend way too much time with it. Organizing helps me a lot to counteract that.

Another issue is time tracking. In general I find it always a little annoying having to spend the last 15 minutes of the day with some company time tracking software. How do you deal with that?

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I use emacs orgmode as a task manager. I also use the time tracking features of org. It was the best investment in my productivity and peace of mind. I use org since 2006.

I'm curious what is org? Do you have a link you can share?

http://orgmode.org/

Org mode is an emacs extension that defines a plain-text format in which you can take notes. It also includes a rather extensive system to manage and schedule tasks and todos (cf. the "Org Agenda").

It has a rather steep learning curve however, especially if you're new to emacs too. From what I know about it so far, I really like the premise and philosophy behind it, but I haven't managed to fully switch to an org-based setup for scheduling yet.

I would also be interested in what others here use to access/modify their schedule. Since I can't use Emacs for work, an option to quickly access it from my phone would be rather crucial, and the options I've found so far are mostly quite minimalistic...

I'm thinking some (basic) self-hosted, web-based tooling to manage the schedule in a Git-Repo would be very useful.

Did you take a look at orgzly http://www.orgzly.com/

https://www.google.com/search?q=emacs+orgmode

Looks promising. I'll check it out. Thanks for sharing!

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