When Florina Xhabija mentioned how much she liked the way I shared my goals on my website and how each goal was associated with a next action, I was reminded of the 101-goals-in-1001-days project I'd started soon after I revamped my site.

My target date is 2010.07.02, which is in 972 days. =) Here's the list: 101 goals in 1001 days.

Random Emacs symbol: toggle-uniquify-buffer-names - Command: Toggle whether to uniquify buffer names by adding parent directory names.

Here's how I generated my list of 101 short-term goals.

First, I brainstormed the list of goals in an org-mode file. Each goal is represented by a level-2 outline heading. Current projects are tagged :PROJECT:. The goals are grouped under level-1 outline headings, like this:

 * Reading, Writing, and Sharing
 ** 30. Write and publish a 350-page book about Emacs :PROJECT:

Then I went through all of the goals and added next actions to each of them.

 * Reading, Writing, and Sharing
 ** 30. Write and publish a 350-page book about Emacs :PROJECT:
 *** TODO 30min Write another blog post about Emacs.

This made it easy to keep track of my finished tasks. Whenever I finished a next action, I'd mark a task as DONE and create another task in the same project. (Hey, I can automate that bit...)

To generate the list of next actions for projects without including the finished tasks, I used C-c C-v (org-show-todo-tree). I found that command by typing M-x org-show- and letting icomplete-mode show me the possible functions.

Then I exported the visible tree to a temporary buffer with C-c C-e v SPC (org-export, visible, keep buffer). I used re-builder to test a regular expression that combined the project headline with the task headline. I then copied the regular expression into a short Lisp program that replaced all the matching lines with the table row. I then exported this with C-c C-e H (org-export, HTML to buffer) and edited the page a little before saving it to a file.

This ability to quickly parse and massage the data into the form I want is one of the things that I love about Emacs. =)

On Technorati: emacs, org

Random Emacs symbol: debugger-setup-buffer - Function: Initialize the `*Backtrace*' buffer for entry to the debugger.