Re: [O] Organizing and taming hectic Academia work (faculty viewpoint)? Tips or a good guides sought after :)

[Alan Schmitt]

Hi,

On 2015-06-08 18:39, Xebar Saram <address@hidden> writes:

> i am looking for 2 things really: 
> 1. as i said in the post topic a good guide if anyone is aware of or detailed
> examples of using org in Academia (mainly aimed at faculty :))
>
> 2. related to that as a young researcher with multiple students, paper
> writing, grant applications, department duties, endless TODOS, endless email i
> would really be grateful for even non org specific tips on how other people
> organize all this to make life more..well..organized :)

I'm in academia and I use org (also not to its full potential). Some
great tips were already given, let me add a couple.

I try to keep notes for every paper that I read. I have found org-ref to
be really useful to keep the links between the notes and the papers
(https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref).

If you write many letters (for instance recommendation letters), you
might be interested in koma export.
(http://orgmode.org/worg/exporters/koma-letter-export.html)

Finally, I have found that one of the biggest pitfalls (for me) in
working in academia is to spend all my time dealing with urgent, but not
necessarily important, things. Following the procrastination matrix (see
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/procrastination-matrix.html for an
entertaining description), I use a "@Q2" tag for things that are
important and not urgent, and I reserve some time to work on them. The
ones I'm currently working on are scheduled, and they are shown in my
custom agenda view using this:

#+begin_src emacs-lisp
("q" "Q2 tasks"
 ((agenda
   ""
   ((org-agenda-overriding-header "Q2 Scheduled")
    (org-agenda-skip-function '(org-agenda-skip-entry-if 'notregexp ":@Q2:"))))
  (tags-todo
   "@Q2/!-HOLD-WAITING"
   ((org-agenda-overriding-header "Q2")
    (org-agenda-todo-ignore-deadlines t)
    (org-agenda-todo-ignore-scheduled t)))))
#+end_src

Best,

Alan

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