agenda.org

Agenda

The Agenda in org allows you to use scheduling markers on a task to help visualize your goals for the day. The agenda is really a collection of aggregate filtered views on a subset of your todo’s.

Like most things in orgextended the agenda is a work in progress, and currently quite a mess That said, there are some very useful pieces already present in the system.

• Space on any item in the agenda will open that item in a seperate group.
• Enter on any item in the agenda will open that item in the current group.
• Ctrl+w will close the agenda view.
• The habit visualizer leaves something to be desired, it does not yet support the restart options that most habits do in org, BUT, it is still present and gives you a semblance of how well you are tracking with your habits.
• The main agenda view is a custom list of visualizers you would like to see.

Custom Agenda views can be defined in the AgendaCustomViews dictionary in your orgextended.sublime-settings file. The Default view is the view that will show when you call OrgAgendaCustomView. To choose one of the other views use OrgAgendaChooseView this will pop up a quick select panel allowing you to select a view.

"AgendaCustomViews": 
{
    "Default": ["Calendar", "Week", "Day", "Blocked Projects", "Next Tasks", "Loose Tasks"],
    "Todos":   ["Todos"],
    "Notes":   ["Notes"],
    "Flags":   ["Todos : tagfilter |TAG1 |OTHERTAGS", "Todos : tagfilter OTHERTAGS"],
},

There are quite a few defined views:

Calendar

This is a 3 month view that will highlight the currently selected day and days with scheduled TODOs

Day

The day view is a single days schedule that will show tasks scheduled for that day

Blocked Projects

This is a list of projects without a NEXT tag. This is to help with a GTD style flow.

Next Tasks

This is a list of tasks marked as NEXT to help decide what needs to be done next.

Todos

This is a generic list of Todos that can be filtered by tags, priorities etc.

Notes

This is a list of your notes, again this can be filtered by tags etc.

Meetings

This is a list of meetings

Phone

This is a list of meetings marked as PHONE calls.

Week

This is a week view helping with a quick open slot / week at a glance view.

Tags

You can filter one of these views to a set of tags as follows

"NAMEOFVIEW : tagfilter [MODIFIER]TAGNAME [MODIFIER]TAGNAME"

The modifiers determine how those tags are matched:

• - a minus sign ensures that tag IS NOT assigned to this heading.
• + a plus sign ensures that ALL tags with a plus are assigned to this heading.
• | an or or vertical bar ensures that ONE OF the tags listed this way are assigned to this heading.

Priorities

You can use the same kind of filter with priorities:

"NAMEOFVIEW : priorityfilter [MODIFIER]Priority [MODIFIER]Priority"

Has Modifiers

hasschedule

Requries the task be scheduled

hasdeadline

Requires the task have a deadline

hasclock

Requires the task have clocking values

hasclose

Requires the task be a closed task (only for views that allow closed tasks)

noschedule

Requires the task is not scheduled

nodeadline

Requires the task not have a deadline

noclock

Requires the task not have any clocking values

noclose

Requires the task not have a close entry

"NAMEOFVIEW : hasclock : noschedule"

Start Day

Sometimes it is nicer to have the week view start on monday or restricted to only working days. This can be done using some settings:

// By default our first day of the week is Sunday
// But some people prefer the first day to be monday
"agendaFirstDay":        1,
"agendaWeekViewNumDays": 5

This sets the first day of the week and month view to monday (Sunday + 1) AND it restricts the number of days in the week view render to 5 (Monday - Friday) agendaFirstDay can be a number OR it can be a string with a day of the week.

Movement

You can change the active day in your agenda using the right and left angle brackets (usually shift comma and shift period).

Notifications

OrgExtended has the start of a notification system. It is not yet super stable. However, the notification thread is a background system that starts up when OrgExtended starts. It will do the following:

• Start when sublime starts.
• Scan all files in your agenda list and build a model of scheduled tasks for today.
• Periodically rebuild that task list.
• Periodically detect approaching tasks and attempt to notify you.

The system as it currently stands is not very configurable, but that will change. The system currently is hard coded to do 2 things:

• Show a full screen view with your current notifications for today.
• On Windows: Run showballoontip.ps1 to pop up a windows notification about your impending event.

Eventually I hope that this system can be made much more flexible and work on various platforms. For now, this is what we have.