Re: [Orgmode] Newbie Questions

[Nick Dokos]

Andrew M. Nuxoll <address@hidden> wrote:

> Also, Dominick said you had to be nice to me while he was away.
> 

Just an FYI (a nice one since Carsten said so :-): Carsten is the first
name, Dominik (no c) is the surname of the creator of Org-mode. And I
promise we'll be nice even after he comes back :-)

> 1.  When I view my agenda for a day it displays TODO items twice if they 
> are both SCHEDULED and DEADLINEd (a common occurrence for me).  Can this 
> be avoided?  Here's a generic example snippet from my agenda:
>     Thursday    9 July 2009
>       nux:        Scheduled:  TODO [#B] Call Mary :PROJECT::
>       nux:        In   1 d.:  TODO [#B] Call Mary :PROJECT::
> 

I think you SCHEDULE an item on a given day, in order to start working
on it on that day. There is generally no penalty for taking perhaps a
long time to finish it, or rescheduling it for a later time. All that
happens is that at some point in the future it'll pop up in the
agenda. DEADLINE on the other hand implies a penalty: if you don't
finish it by the deadline, something bad is going to happen. It then
starts appearing in the agenda a few days before the actual deadline to
remind you of the dire consequences, should you miss the deadline. How
many days before is controllable either by a global variable or by
modifying the timestamp (see section 8.3 of the manual: Deadlines and
Scheduling). Apologies if you already know the details, but I wanted
to highlight the difference between these two.

So let me turn the question around: why do you need to both SCHEDULE
and DEADLINE the same item?

> 2.  Once a TODO item has been marked as DONE, it still shows up on my 
> agenda.  Can this be avoided? 
> 

I believe this was answered already.

> 
> Meta-Comments on Questions 1&2:  I realize I have the option of using 
> the "ToDo Items" agenda view instead of the day/week agenda view but 
> that doesn't work for me because I use the SCHEDULED property as a way 
> of selecting a small subset of tasks for the day from a long list of 
> TODO items.  I also rely heavily upon repeating tasks to automate most 
> of this.  So maybe the solution to #1 and #2 is to use a custom agenda 
> of some sort but I don't see an obvious way to create one that does what 
> I want.
> 
> 3.  Once I set a deadline for a task, it'd be nice if the priority would 
> increase as the deadline approached.  Ideally the  criteria for 
> increasing the priority could be specified via a customizable formula.  
> Does this functionality (or anything like it) exist?
> 

I don't think anything like that exists, but with a Small[1] Amount of
Programming (TM), it could probably be cobbled up - maybe as a cron job?


Nick

[1] OK, maybe not so small...