sacha chua :: living an awesome life

Create planner tasks whenever e-mail requires you to act. That way, you don't have to hunt through your inbox every time you need to figure out what to work on. If your response to an e-mail will take less than two minutes and you know you won't get distracted, go ahead and act on it immediately; you don't need to capture it. If you want to track your action for completeness, create a task for it. Planner makes it so easy to capture and organize tasks that even two-minute tasks are still worth recording.

Tasks are automatically linked to the e-mail message being viewed, making it easy to return to the original message for more details. You can schedule tasks immediately or leave them on today's page. If you want tasks to be undated by default, set planner-expand-name-default to nil.

Create planner tasks whenever you need to follow up a task you've delegated to someone else. Assign it to a different plan page. If you prefer to use a single plan page, make task sorting easier by adding a keyword to the description (ex: #A _ +waiting for year-end sales report : E-Mail from Jim). This makes it easy to review all the things you're waiting for.

Write clear and concise task descriptions. "Prepare year-end sales report" is a better task description than "Work on this". Planner will automatically add the e-mail author's name as a hyperlink, like ": E-Mail from Kathy".

Using Planner to keep track of your e-mail related tasks also makes it easier for you to organize and plan your day. E-mail doesn't let you specify when you want to work on something, but Planner lets you schedule your tasks onto specific days. It can also carry over unfinished tasks, so you know that nothing will slip through the cracks.

After you've read all your e-mail and responded to everything you could quickly process, you can choose when to work on other tasks that take more time. Review your list of e-mail-related tasks and start organizing them.

You can schedule a task onto a particular day by using planner-copy-or-move-task (C-c C-c) while point is on the task. You can specify actual dates (yyyy.mm.dd, mm.dd, or just dd), or you can use Planner's relative dates features to schedule things for next Friday (+fri), two days from now (+2), or even the 3rd Tuesday after March 1 (+3tue3.1). Use planner-copy-or-move-region to schedule multiple tasks.

You can schedule tasks for particular times as well. Simply add time (ex: @1000-1300) to your task description using planner-edit-task-description (bind this to a shortcut key if you use it often). Modules like planner-appt.el can extract the time information and display your schedule, and you can change your planner-sort-tasks-key-function to sort tasks by time first and then by priority.

And there you have it—an organized way to make sense of your inbox by making it easy to see just what you need to do.

1. Set up mail for Emacs, if you haven't done that already. If you're

new to Emacs, I recommend checking out http://www.emacswiki.org and http://my.gnus.org .

2. Bind planner-create-task-from-buffer to a keyboard shortcut you can

use from anywhere. For example, add the following line to your ~/emacs in order to use C-c t as your create-task shortcut:

(global-set-key "\C-ct" 'planner-create-task-from-buffer)

3. Load the Planner module corresponding to your preferred mail client:

For example, add

(require 'planner-gnus)

Now you can deal with inbox insanity the Planner way!