I saw lots of activity around Org and less and less around Planner (plus, Org is in Emacs CVS), so I decided to give it a try.

Understand I'm a poor planner, so I don't really have a "style" of planning. I make sporadic use of the tools, but find they're really great when I use them.

The most important thing to me was billing time and I had already spent time setting up timeclock so that I could clock-in and -out of Planner tasks. Org has a nice time tracker, but it wasn't obvious to me how to create a report for client X in month Y.

In the end, I had to switch back because of the timeclock thing and because I was already used to creating tasks and moving them around between days in Planner.

Hey what's wrong with a simple text file?
I have been using that for years, and it does the job for me.
(I don't really need to publish, just to have a TODO file so I don't forget stuff.)

Thanks for answering my question. That helps. In a month or so, I'll probably post my own evaluation.

Sacha, sorry for an emotional text: you are the best :) Really really. I would be really happy to talk to you about all that hacking stuff around.

BTW, I started to use planner under your influence and now you are convincing people that Org-mode is better. :) What the hit!

I set up my org to autmatically clock in/out when changing todo state. It is easy to push files to your agenda files stack and cycle your agenda files there after (just by pressing C-,). One page for each customer, one directory for all planning pages and your organized perfectly. The tasks get documented in the same file and it's easy to get the billing stuff done.

Just put a headline there

* Tasks until bill from 03.14.2008

when the bill is out. This is exactly the point where org is strong. It keeps the TODOS, the timeclock, the description of the problem and the solution all together in one place. SHIFT-TAB folds the whole thing to an overview handy overview. I have pages containing 70 or more tasks including descriptions and handle them easily with org.

It goes:

* Customer calling
* C-, until I see his planning page
* Initial view is 'structure', so usally I never have to move point more than a fiew lines, since I add new task at beginning of the file.
* TAB TAB and see everything concerning the task the customers question is about.
* C-c C-x C-d and I see an overlay summing up all subtasks of the task in question (and all the other tasks too).

Currently I do all my writings and planing in org mode. I just love it :-)

Sacha,

thanx for the article. i am testing org-mode for the moment. in the past i used mozilla sunbird for planning but got frustrated, because all the bits of infos were spread over the days and months' entries. one text file seriously gives the advantage and with outline view it is simple to navigate. my problem is only that i find it difficult to make schedules and dealines. in sunbird you can see the days and you mark the days/weeks/months for a particular subtask/project and you can see whether you are busy in the following weeks and therefore try to avoid overloading your schedule. but with org-mode there is no such simple graphical representation nor is it simple to adapt and clearify when using agenda-timeline mode. do you know what i mean? it would be great to have little colored boxes or whatever in emacs showing monday-friday scheduled for project xyz, and so i know whether i have still enough space to plan sth for,e.g. mon-tue. it it must also be easy to alter the dates; but most important the clear illustration. do you know how to hack around this? i am unfamiliar with lisp code.

kev

Hi Sacha,

Any update on how this is going for you? I recently got back to using planner after I figured out how to get my messages from Mail.app (OS X) into it. Org mode sounds like you would end up with some very messy pages. I guess I also keep extensive notes on my projects. I've used planner throughout for that.

Cheers, Jody

Dear Sacha,
I am like one of the other readers of this posting that followed your (and others) lead into using planner for daily activities, so the fact that you have moved on onto org-mode makes feel that I need to check org-mode. However, I have a huge back log of notes and tasks created and managed with planner. Do you know if anybody has attempted to create a converter from one system to the other?
Also, in your opinion, how do you manage a very large number of projects to avoid having a big clutter?

-Mario

Org or Planner ? None of them. I have switched to howm mode which is the one that works best for me.

I also gotten hooked up on emacs-planner based on your writings and then I had a few issues --- out of sync tasks, things that disappeared when I accidentally edited one file (I like typing keywords rather than typing commands), quite inactive mailing list etc -- so started looking into orgmode and switched to that. I miss the tight integration with .muse mode. rest. I am liking and still customizing.

right now, I have to learn good practices on searching. I want it to keep track of old and new projects and search them, even archived ones.

thanks for sharing all your thoughts, hacks etc...

Try creating a shell script that uses grep to search your files, give it a short name, put it in your path, and then use M-x grep. Or write a command that uses grep or something like it to search just your agenda files. =)

Hope that helps!

That is roughly how I do it, sans-emacs, but I was thinking of a more structured one . thanks again :)