The need for a productivity system

Recently, I’ve realised that keeping track of ideas, tasks, and appointments — either in my head or through inconsistent methods — has become a bottleneck to achieving my goals.

As a heavy user of the Emacs text editor, the most natural solution was to finally start actively leveraging its “Org mode”.

What is Org mode in Emacs?

Org mode is essentially a subsystem of the Emacs text editor, which provides customisable functionality for things like:

  • Task management
  • Project planning
  • Note taking

Despite having used Emacs for a number of years, I never integrated Org mode into my routine until now.

Its slogan is “Your life in plain text”. This is referring to the fact that, as opposed to typical productivity software suites, everything in Emacs+Org mode is a text file.

It’s one of its main selling points for me.

Being able to navigate and edit text in exactly the same way that I do when programming is great; the benefits of Emacs compound the more things that you use it for, due to the consistent keybindings and user experience, and reduced context switching between multiple applications.

Having everything version controlled via Git is also a major plus.

A workflow that has suited me so far

Capturing notes and tasks

I’ve found that this is the core component of using Org mode effectively.

Making the capturing of notes and tasks as frictionless as possible, is what the makes the whole system work.

I have the keybinding C-c o c, which can be used from anywhere in Emacs, to display a window to select an Org capture template.

Currently, I have four types of captures:

  • Work tasks
    • Anything work-related that I intend to do. Often these are tasks that don’t fit well as tasks in typical issue tracking systems like Jira.
  • Personal tasks
    • Any non-work tasks, e.g. for hobbies or side projects.
  • Appointments/meetings
    • Scheduled TODOs that I want to be reminded of
  • Notes
    • Any free-form text that is not a task; ideas, random thoughts, things I want to remember in general, etc.

Reviewing tasks

This is where “Org agenda” comes in. It displays a calendar-like view of all scheduled tasks, which is a very helpful way of staying on top of things that I’ve planned to do.

I have it bound to C-c o a (All my org-mode bindings have the C-c o prefix, usable from anywhere in Emacs, which also helps reduce friction).

Organising and reviewing notes

I keep a single notes.org file with a top-level heading for each note.

On a regular basis, I’ll:

  • Read through each note.
  • Decide if I want to keep it or remove it.
  • If I keep it, I’ll move it to a dedicated file depending on how I choose to categorise it.

I’ve experimented with using Org Roam to store a hierarchy of long-term notes, however I haven’t felt fully comfortable with it yet. This is one area of my Org mode usage that I’d like to explore further.

Conclusion

Having a consistent, low-friction way of externalising what’s in my head has been the main benefit of adopting this system.

Using Emacs and Org mode makes this feel very natural, because it’s part of the same environment I already use every day — both for my work as a Platform Engineer, and for the Lisp-based music composition I’ve been exploring.

I hope this post is useful to fellow Emacs users who, like me for a long time, haven’t quite managed to get started with Org mode — as well as to those who’ve never used Emacs at all, but are curious about what it can offer.