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6.2.2 Organizing Your Tasks

Okay, now that you've gotten the hang of creating tasks, you're probably facing a really long list of things to do. How can you organize them so that they don't overwhelm you? Planner gives you a number of strategies for dealing with large numbers of tasks.

  1. Arrange your tasks in the rough order you're going to do them.
  2. Use #A, #B and #C task priorities to differentiate between high-priority, normal and low-priority tasks.
  3. Schedule your tasks onto different days.
  4. Group your tasks into plan pages.
  5. Don't schedule all your tasks.
  1. Task order

    To remind yourself to do tasks in a certain order, simply edit the lines so that they're in the order you want. You can use normal editing commands like kill, yank and transpose-line to reorder the tasks, or use <M-p> (planner-raise-task) and <M-n> (planner-lower-task) to rearrange the tasks.

  2. Task priorities

    By default, tasks are created with medium priority (‘#B’). You can make a task high-priority (‘#A’) or low-priority (‘#C’) by manually editing the task and calling M-x planner-update-task to update the linked page. Alternatively, you can use <C-M-p> (planner-raise-task-priority) and <C-M-n> (planner-lower-task-priority) to modify the task and update the linked page.

    You can edit the priority of a task using M-x planner-edit-task-priority, or manually edit it and call M-x planner-update-task to update tasks on the linked page.

  3. Schedule your tasks on different days

    You don't have to do everything today. Is this a task you would rather do tomorrow? Schedule it for then instead. You can specify ‘+n’ or ‘-n’ whenever you are asked for a date, where n is the number of days before or after the current file's date or today. Don't over-procrastinate things, though!

  4. Plan pages

    Plan pages let you group related tasks and notes together for easy reference. For example, you could have a plan page for each major project or goal in your life, like ‘GoodHealth’ or ‘FurtherStudies’.

    Although plan pages start by grouping everything under a ‘* Tasks’ header, you can organize your plan pages in different ways. For example, you can separate groups of tasks with blank lines, and Planner will sort tasks within each group.

  5. Tasks without dates

    Plan pages also allow you to have undated tasks or tasks with no particular deadlines. This keeps your daily task list small and manageable while making it easier for you to find things to do if you have free time. Make sure you check your plan pages regularly so that you don't completely forget about them.

    For automated scheduling of the next task on a plan page after you complete a task, see the section in http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/emacs/planner-config.el named “Schedule next undated task from same project”.