Re: Deleting (not archiving) TODO items when done

[Tim Cross]

William Denton <wtd@pobox.com> writes:

> When I've marked a TODO item as DONE and want to get it out of my projects 
> list,
> I've always used C-c C-x C-a (org-archive-subtree-default) to get it out of 
> the
> way.
>
> Today I had to go through the archive file to find an old note about 
> something,
> and the file was huge because it was filled with many trivial TODOs that 
> didn't
> need to be archived.  For example, If I'm waiting to hear back from someone,
> when they reply I usually just want to mark the task DONE and delete it.  I
> don't need to record it forever.
>
> Maybe I've been using the archiving not as intended, but I don't see any other
> command for getting rid of a TODO.  I can't find a command to delete the 
> current
> task.  Am I missing something?  Is there a keystroke to delete a TODO?  Or 
> does
> everyone archive everything?
>

I just delete them using standard Emacs commands. I'm not sure there is
a need for a special 'delete todo' command. It would be easy to code one
yourself if you want one.

With respect to archiving, there is probably some room for more
sophisticated archiving patterns. What I tend to do is at the start of
each year, move all my archive files to a new name which includes the
year in the archive filename. then after a few years, I simply delete
any archives older than 7 years. I find any data older than that is
rarely, if ever, relevant or useful, plus if I really, really want it,
it will be in one of my backup snapshots or git. This means my archive
files don't get to be gigantic and I can search back through just the
archives for a specific year.

In reality, I could probably get rid of old archives much sooner. It is
extremely rare for me to go through archives older than 1 year (I think
I've only ever done this once since I started using org).