Vanilla Org
In keeping with my Emacs philosophy, I try to avoid using packages like org-roam that significantly extend the capabilities of Org, or even ones like Denote that primarily serve to complement it. This is especially important for the long-term stability of this website: I still want to be able to build the site from source 10 years from now.
Journal
From 2023 to 2025, I used a Bullet Journal (BuJo) for tracking my time-sensitive tasks and plans. This worked better than the more structured planner previously, and is the only paper-based productivity system I could recommend, since you can adopt it with a cheap notebook (that you might already have) and a 4 minute Youtube video.
After starting a new job, I started using Org in place of the BuJo. The primary components of the BuJo are lists of tasks, notes and events, for each month and day. Initially, I tried to manually maintain a headline structure with one headline for each day or month, and the relevant tasks, notes and events as headlines underneath. This quickly became unmanageable, since I spent a long time managing the structure, and flipping between the headlines for the current day and month.
I have now developed a better workflow, that leverages Org’s capabilities, and the strengths of the digital medium. The (highly unoriginal) key tenet of my new approach is to treat a collection of Org files as a plain-text database, prioritising search, and minimising the effort required to add and update its contents.
Capture
I use org-capture, with a set of capture templates that all have the
file+olp+datetree target type. Any entry created with these
templates is automatically inserted under the relevant day, in a year
> month > day headline hierarchy in a single journal.org file. This
automatic outlining reduces the friction involved with creating a new
note: I can hit C-c c t and immediate create a headline for a new
TODO item (task) at the right place in the hierarchy.
One potential issue I encountered with this system is that I may
sometimes create entries that refer to events or tasks in the future
under the headline for the current day. Fortunately, the
org-datetree-cleanup command can automatically refile any headlines
with timestamps appropriately.
Note that unlike in a BuJo, there is no separation between small tasks for the current day, long-term planning, and events I need to remember in the far future. It is unnecessary.
Project Notes and Refiling
While I keep most of my notes in the journal.org file, I also maintain separate Org files for large, ongoing projects. Each file has a top-level “Tasks” heading, which I can refile tasks under from the journal.org file. This makes it easier to refer back to tasks that may take months to complete, and makes them easier to distinguish in the Agenda view, since entries are automatically tagged with the name of the file they are in.
Agenda
While org-capture defines the schema of the database, org-agenda provides the views to manipulate it at a high level. From prior experience using Agenda, I knew that the global TODO entries view was useless, since it immediately becomes unmanageable once you have more than about 20 incomplete tasks. Instead, I predominantly use the “Daily agenda” view. This it much easier to manage large numbers of tasks, since I can re-schedule any tasks I can’t or don’t want to deal with to a later date, and they disappear from the view. Only headlines with active timestamps are included in the Daily agenda, so I have configured all the relevant capture templates to automatically timestamp new entries, marked as a deadline or scheduled start time for tasks.