The topic of this month's Emacs Carnival interests me, even though I "dump ... notes into a directory and simply grep for information ...."0 Org does not work the way my brain works,1 or rather, my brain doesn't work the way Org works.
I do use Org. At first I created a few Org files (work.org and home.org, and maybe todo.org) thinking I could rigidly dedicate all my topics to them.
Over time I had about dozen files, one for nearly every major facet of my
life until I gave up. Why? Because it really doesn't matter where I
put Org TODOs and their notes. When I need to locate something, Org
provides a way to search entries for a regular expression, which is
what grep does, sans all that Unixy CLI stuff.
So faced with the task of paying one of my wife's medical bills, I
could agonize over whether to put the task into wife.org or
bills.org or medical.org.2 Or I
could just:
- establish the task somewhere,
- act on it
- link to a receipt
- mark it done3
I created a special template for org-capture, which places these
one-off tasks into todo.org. And it clocks into the task, too.
A topic with even greater complexity is "education." I'm a lifelong
learner; my edu.org file has (only) 29 headings, all of
which have at least a few subheadings. If I learn about an Emacs
feature, I might want to write about it, so I'll put a task
into blog.org that links to it.
Occasionally a post will span multiple topics in edu.org,
topics such as Emacs, Vivaldi, LibreOffice, HTML or LaTeX. In a year
from now, which file should I look for it in? The keystroke C-c
a s comes to the rescue.4 I might search for "Sacha"
because all I remember is that I discovered an Emacs feature on
Sacha's website.5 Incidentally, I get 13 hits when I
search for "Sacha," one of which was the one I had in mind.
The question I think all Emacs users face is, "At what point does tweaking Emacs (and self-quantifying tools in general) tip the scales from aiding our progress to impeding it?" I dread going down a Knowledge Management rabbit hole,6 but I'm sure I'll enjoy the leap.
0 Charlie Holland's Search for Knowledge
1 A tree works like your brain.
2 Don't even get me started on insurance.
3 All of this occurs while clocked in to the task.
4 In this case, C-c a is bound to org-agenda.
6 Can one gain knowledge of Knowledge Management Systems without having a Knowledge Management System in which to record that knowledge? That may be a Zen koan for someone.
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