[Emacs-orgmode] Use case of TIMESTAMP, SCHEDULED and DEADLINE

[Christian Egli]

Hi all

I live in Org-Agenda Week mode. This is where I look at my tasks for
today and for the rest of the week.

So the typical use case for me is that I take notes for a certain
project, let's say I have in my desktop-project.org

* Desktop Training
** Call Trainer
clarify the content of the training
** Setup training room
** prepare desktop machines
** Training is on April 18th

As you can see I mix notes and tasks. Ok, now the first three are tasks
so I C-c C-t on them which changes desktop-project.org as follows:

* Desktop Training
** TODO Call Trainer
clarify the content of the training
** TODO Setup training room
** TODO prepare desktop machines
** Training is on April 18th

I know that the training is on the 18th so I need to do the tasks this
week, so I schedule them for sometime this week, so I do a couple of C-c
C-s. Note that I do not use DEADLINE, as I schedule the tasks so that
they will be done before the deadline. If I now look at my Org-Agenda I
see the following:

ALL CURRENTLY OPEN TODO ITEMS:
desktop-project:TODO Call Trainer
desktop-project:TODO Setup training room
desktop-project:TODO prepare desktop machines
work: TODO Write Article
Monday 10 April 2006
desktop-project:Scheduled: TODO Call Trainer
Tuesday 11 April 2006
desktop-project:Scheduled: TODO prepare desktop machines
work:Scheduled: TODO Write Article
Wednesday 12 April 2006
desktop-project:Scheduled: TODO Setup training room
Thursday 13 April 2006
Friday 14 April 2006
Saturday 15 April 2006
Sunday 16 April 2006

Now in the week overview I can see that I also plan to write an article
on Tuesday. This will leave me no time to prepare the desktop machines
so I reschedule this task to Wednesday by S-right on the task.

As soon as I've called the trainer I press `t' on the "Call Trainer"
Task and this marks the task as DONE.

So far everything is fine. But there are a couple of questions:

1. What is the use case of TIMESTAMP? I seem to only have a use for
SCHEDULED, so marking them as "Scheduled:" in the Org-Agenda
Week mode is superfluous for me. What do other people use it
for?
2. I would like tasks that are scheduled to no longer show up as
"CURRENTLY OPEN TODO ITEMS". For me open items are items that
have not been scheduled yet and that I need to schedule.
3. The sorting of items within a day is a mystery to me. I would
like to sort them by state (TODO, DONE) and priority. Sorting by
priority seems to work for the CURRENTLY OPEN TODO ITEMS but not
for a specific day. I modified the to '(time-up priority-down),
but it still sorts by category for the days. I tried to debug
this but did not find my way around the code
((org-finalize-agenda-entries).
4. When doing some mucking around the code should I use org-mode
from Emacs CVS or the one from Carstens Website?

Thanks

[Carsten Dominik]

Post by Christian Egli
4. When doing some mucking around the code should I use org-mode
from Emacs CVS or the one from Carstens Website?

For now, only a quick answer to this last point. Please, all comments
about code and new ideas relative to what is on my website. For the
Emacs CVS code: bug reports only, please.

- Carsten

[Austin Frank]

Post by Christian Egli
1. What is the use case of TIMESTAMP? I seem to only have a use
for SCHEDULED, so marking them as "Scheduled:" in the
Org-Agenda Week mode is superfluous for me. What do other
people use it for?

Hello! In my previous thread I noted that I want to use org to manage
notes and tasks. This left out an important aspect of the way I have
used org and intend to, one of things that actually pushed me toward the
system in the first place. I also need to track how I'm spending time
on my tasks.

I recently lost ~20 lbs, and the most important tool for affecting that
change was writing down my weight every day and kept a running average
(I used the system described in the Hacker's Diet). Just seeing the
trend was enough to keep me motivated to eat a little bit less each day,
or find a small extra opportunity to be active.

As a graduate student I'm not required to do much in the way of
accounting for how I use my time, as long as certain long-term
milestones are met. This can make it difficult to stay on task during
shorter stretches. Even breaking large tasks into small ones and
documenting my progress on them can sometimes lead to a lot of small
tasks being put off just as long as the large one would have been.

So, just like for weight loss, I want to start keeping a record of my
daily time use. Hopefully, once I have enough data to aggregate and
look at the trends, I'll be able to pinpoint areas where I can improve
and will be able to motivate myself to stay on task longer or return to
my tasks more quickly after distractions.

A guide for beginning grad students in the computer science department
at my university suggests keeping a log file where you record your
accomplishments at 15 minute intervals on days when you're having
trouble being productive. I've tried this, using an external timer and
marking an org file with a time stamp for each entry. I found the
method to be both too frequent and too removed from my current task to
be especially useful.

My intention is to keep an org file (per day? per week? per month?)
where I track my work using timestamp ranges and links. When I start on
a task I'll make a time stamp and link to a resource relevant to the
task (the file I'm editing, the article I'm reading, notes from the
class I'm going to). When I finish a task or change tasks, I'll mark
the end of the time range I spent on that task (and begin a new one if
necessary). In some cases I'll record notes with the entry about what
happened while I worked, to try to pin down things that are especially
effective or especially distracting.

I do think there's something to the notion of making regular progress
reports while you work during stretches where it's hard to stay on task.
In a case where I was following this strategy, I would still start an
entry with a time range and a link to my current work, but I might
include sub-entries marked with timestamps to allow me to keep
finer-grained records of my progress. I intend to write a nag-me elisp
function that prompts for a new entry after a certain amount of time has
elapsed-- hopefully with programmable prompt intervals. I have a hunch
that an exponential function describing the interval between prompts
might be effective: record often early in the task to get myself honed
in, but record less often as time passes and I become more involved with
the work.

I believe that tagging these progress entries with a series of
categorical tags will allow me to aggregate across similar tasks and do
some analysis of how much time I'm spending on different tasks. I'd
like to be able to ask questions like "How much time did I spend last
week on project X?", "How much time did I spend last week on all
research projects?", and "How much time did I spend last week working
productively?". I'm hopeful that the org/tables/calc combination will
serve me well in pursuing this.

Hope that gives you some ideas about some potential uses of timestamps
and time ranges. I'd welcome any comments about the ideas I've
described here, whether people are using similar systems or have
different approaches to the same kind of issue.

Thanks,
/au

[Carsten Dominik]

Post by Christian Egli
1. What is the use case of TIMESTAMP? I seem to only have a use for
SCHEDULED, so marking them as "Scheduled:" in the Org-Agenda
Week mode is superfluous for me. What do other people use it
for?

The *intended* difference (which may have nothing to do with
the way things are being used...) is the following:

TIMESTAMPS are for marking events or appointments. For
example, you can use a range to write down when a certain meeting
will take place, or you can put a timestamp when you you are
supposed to be somewhere, like an date for the movie theater.
Timestamps show up in the agenda only on the specified day,
not before, not after. Just like writing down something in a
paper agenda.

Scheduled items on the other hand stay in the agenda for today
until you mark them DONE. They a like a small child complaining
"Daddy, you promised to play football with me yesterday, you did
not, so I will keep complaining until you do". If you scheduled
something for yesterday and did not make it done, it will be in
your agenda for today until you do. In this way,
scheduled items are very much like deadlines - the only difference
is that deadlines start showing up on your agenda a few days
before they are due. Scheduled items only show up on the
scheduled date. Both stay in the agenda until marked done.

Post by Christian Egli
2. I would like tasks that are scheduled to no longer show up as
"CURRENTLY OPEN TODO ITEMS". For me open items are items that
have not been scheduled yet and that I need to schedule.

Hmmm, yes, I can see how this would be useful, but this is
not how it works now. I'll put this on my list to think about.

Post by Christian Egli
3. The sorting of items within a day is a mystery to me. I would
like to sort them by state (TODO, DONE) and priority. Sorting by
priority seems to work for the CURRENTLY OPEN TODO ITEMS but not
for a specific day. I modified the to '(time-up priority-down),
but it still sorts by category for the days. I tried to debug
this but did not find my way around the code
((org-finalize-agenda-entries).

OK, let me explain sorting, maybe this will make things clearer.
First of all, in your agenda for a day, things are not *sorted*
by category. Things are collected from the different files, so
that means *initially* the items are already in the sequence as
given in org-agenda-files, and therefore presorted by category.

Org then attempts to sort the items, but it does change the
sequence of any two items only if it has a reason to do so, for example
if they have different priorities. However, two TODO entries
from different categories have the same priority, so org-mode
will not exchange them, and categories stay together automatically.

Here is some information about priorities, which is not yet
documented.

A TODO entry has priority 1.

Timestamps and ranges, and diary entries have priority 0.

A deadline has priority 100 on the day it is due. On days before
becoming due the deadline has priority 10-(days to due-date)

A scheduled item has priority 99 on the day it is due. So it is
going to be high in the list, but still below deadlines due today.

Explicitly specified priorities #A, #B, and #C add a value
of 2000, 1000, 0, respectively. Items without explicit priority
are treated as being #B.

So a TODO entry normally has priority 1001. If the same line has a
[#A]
cookie, its the total priority would be 2001.

In the agenda you can check the priority of an item with the "P" key,
by the priority is not updated when you change the date or TODO state
of an item. Refresh the agenda with "r" to make sure the correct
priorities are listed for "P".

If you want to get the TODO entries taken apart by keyword, I guess
I would have to assign different priorities for different TODO
keywords. Or make a special TODO sorting key that could be added
to `org-agenda-sorting-strategy'.

If with these explanations you still come to the conclusion that sorting
does not work, then we have a bug to fix.

- Carsten

[Christian Egli]

Hi Carsten

Post by Carsten Dominik

Post by Christian Egli
1. What is the use case of TIMESTAMP?

The *intended* difference (which may have nothing to do with

Thanks, that makes it much more clear.

Post by Carsten Dominik

Post by Christian Egli
2. I would like tasks that are scheduled to no longer show up as
"CURRENTLY OPEN TODO ITEMS". For me open items are items that
have not been scheduled yet and that I need to schedule.

Hmmm, yes, I can see how this would be useful, but this is
not how it works now. I'll put this on my list to think about.

I'll see if I can hack on this.

Post by Carsten Dominik

Post by Christian Egli
3. The sorting of items within a day is a mystery to me. I would
like to sort them by state (TODO, DONE) and priority. Sorting by
priority seems to work for the CURRENTLY OPEN TODO ITEMS but not
for a specific day. I modified the to '(time-up priority-down),
but it still sorts by category for the days. I tried to debug
this but did not find my way around the code
((org-finalize-agenda-entries).

OK, let me explain sorting, maybe this will make things clearer.

Yes, thanks this helps a lot.

Post by Carsten Dominik
Here is some information about priorities, which is not yet
documented.
A TODO entry has priority 1.
Timestamps and ranges, and diary entries have priority 0.
A deadline has priority 100 on the day it is due. On days before
becoming due the deadline has priority 10-(days to due-date)
A scheduled item has priority 99 on the day it is due. So it is
going to be high in the list, but still below deadlines due today.
Explicitly specified priorities #A, #B, and #C add a value
of 2000, 1000, 0, respectively. Items without explicit priority
are treated as being #B.
So a TODO entry normally has priority 1001.

OK, understood.

Post by Carsten Dominik
In the agenda you can check the priority of an item with the "P" key,
by the priority is not updated when you change the date or TODO state
of an item. Refresh the agenda with "r" to make sure the correct
priorities are listed for "P".

This is interesting. Still using CVS Emacs (and org mode), "P" tells me
1001 for "OPEN TODO ITEMS" (2001 for #A, 1 for #C). However scheduled
TODOs which show up on a certain day all have priority -1000 regardless
of their explicitly set priorities. Is this intended?

Post by Carsten Dominik
If you want to get the TODO entries taken apart by keyword, I guess
I would have to assign different priorities for different TODO
keywords. Or make a special TODO sorting key that could be added
to `org-agenda-sorting-strategy'.

I'll look into this.

[Carsten Dominik]

Post by Christian Egli
This is interesting. Still using CVS Emacs (and org mode), "P" tells me
1001 for "OPEN TODO ITEMS" (2001 for #A, 1 for #C). However scheduled
TODOs which show up on a certain day all have priority -1000 regardless
of their explicitly set priorities. Is this intended?

No, it is a bug. Fixed now, for 4.22. Thanks.

- Carsten