jaaronfarr asked me why I switched from Planner to Org. Both of them are popular personal information managers for Emacs, and both of them have practically all the features I need. They both do a good job at helping people

manage tasks, schedule, and notes. If you have a few

months to explore this, I suggest that you try both for at least a

month each. On the other hand, if you want quick results, some time

thinking about how you plan can save you more time later.

I tried out Org because I was working on a chapter about schedule

management and it wasn’t fair to just rely on the manual or the

mailing list. In the beginning, I

felt frustrated by the lack of things I’d gotten used to in Planner:

the freedom to edit anything on my day page, little conveniences like +2tue to mean two Tuesdays from now (which Carsten has just added), publishing my blog…

After two months of using Org almost every day, I’m starting to

understand it. I’ve come to appreciate the ease of working with an

outline. I love the way it clocks time. I find the daily and weekly

views really helpful. I’ve hacked stuff for it: time/load estimation,

time reporting, next action summaries, agenda publishing… I’m fairly deeply

As a geek, I have to confess—I like Planner more. Planner is more fun

to code. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent years with it, and I know my

way around the source.

Maybe it’s because we split Planner up into lots of little pieces that

can be reused and advised. Maybe the modularity of Planner is because

chunks of the code were written on a computer with a teensy screen,

which forced me to write functions that fit 80×48 characters. (See,

that limitation was there for a reason!) There are plenty of entry

points. From time to time, I still find myself copying an entire

function in order to change something in the middle, but usually I can

just get away with wrapping something around something else. With Org,

I find myself doing a lot of copy-and-paste programming. I’d fix this

by breaking the functions down into smaller bits, but I don’t have the

brainspace right now. Maybe after the book.

Org is better for my brain, though. It gives me a better overview of

both the ground-level tasks (what am I going to do right now, today,

this week) as well as the 50,000-foot view (what are my big projects)?

Planner’s good at the ground-level tasks, but the overview’s always

been a little awkward because it has to visit a number of files to get

a big picture. Org handles that easily.

And the one-place-for-data thing of Org is pretty cool, too. Org

dynamically generates reports, which could take a bit longer if you

have a large Org file. Planner copies data wherever it makes sense, so

you’d have a copy of the task on your day page and a copy of the task

on your plan page. Plan pages can get out of sync unless you’re either

religious about using planner-edit-task-description and other

functions to edit your tasks, or you use planner-id and you’re lucky.

Timeclock entries get out of sync, too. You can trust Org more than

Planner in terms of consistency.

So now I’m kinda in the middle of these two modules. I use Org for all

my work tasks, and I’m moving towards using it for all of my personal

tasks as well. But I still keep my blog entries in Planner, even

though they get mirrored into a WordPress blog on my web server.

*What would I recommend?*

It depends on the way you think. If you’re the kind of person who was

never happy with day planners because you needed more space to doodle,

write notes, move things around, add other things, try out Planner. If

you like outlines and organizing your tasks into projects, try out

Org.

Note that just because you work that way now doesn’t mean you’ll work

that way in the future. Don’t worry. Emacs will adapt. You can switch

between Planner and Org fairly easily. Just give yourself a week or so

to adjust (or a month if you’ve customized your old tool extensively

and miss lots of things about it). Use the tool every day, and you’ll

be fine.

Have you tried out both? Or have you tried out one of them and are curious about the other? I’d love to learn from your experience or answer your questions.

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