Another month+ has disappeared and there’s been silence on this blog.  Where does the time go? Here’s where:

• pneumonia
• croup
• reflux
• emergency rooms
• doctors
• viruses
• sleepless nights
• zombie days
• work
• family activities
• TV
• a healthy portion of “I don’t know”

A lot of those things were unforeseen and disproportionately affecting our 6 month old son. Many had a major impact on our daily schedules, mental capacity, and overall productivity. I certainly got
into a state where I was just exhausted and unproductive. Things just weren’t getting finished around the house and I wasn’t happy about it. I just couldn’t get up the energy to change it,either.

About a week and a half ago, I ran across an article on Hacker News about using org-mode in Emacs to implement GTD*. Well, I know Emacs as my standard editor and IDE in Linux, but the rest of that title was foreign to me. I read the article anyway and started to see a path forward for geting back on top of everything.

org-mode is simply a set of features that have been added to the base Emacs functionality which allow you to easily capture all your tasks, events, notes, and much more in a single place. GTD is the abbreviation (I almost said acronym) for Getting Things Done by David Allen, a well-known and popular book on organization of your daily life.

Well, in the last week, I’ve started to try and capture all the tasks I need to accomplish using Emacs. I keep a copy on my work computer and pull a copy every night onto my netbook. Every morning, I re-sync the updates I made overnight and I’m off and running again.

Since moving my tasks and calendar into this system I’ve been more productive and let far fewer tasks slip endlessly, both at home and at work. I’m still reading through the book, trying to understand more of the system, but it’s been a pretty good change for me.

[*] I think this is the article: How I use Emacs and Org-mode to implement GTD, but I don’t remember the exact one and I’ve lost the link.  Either way, I found that page to be extremely helpful.