I have probably sunk something like 300 hours in org-mode and ultimately abandoned it in favor of a system incorporating Evernote and Nozbe. Org-mode has been a source of much frustration for me. It seems so great, it seems to have all the features one could ever want, but every time I’ve tried to implement it (three separate attempts, each time starting from scratch and thinking I knew “what I was doing wrong last time,”) the system has grown huge and unweildly, leaky and unreliable, and missing key features that I needed.
On the plus side I learned how to use emacs really well.
edited to add: The iPhone app is pretty bad, for the following reasons: It is ugly and navigation is unintuitive, and the text-wrapping is essentially broken. Furthermore, you have to manually synchronize every little thing you do both pushing and pulling to your central repository or you’ll quickly end up with inconsistencies which are a disproportionately huge pain to correct.
I actually still use org-mode if I’m simply going to be outlining a complicated project, but I’ve given up on using it as a task manager. I really wanted to like org-mode.
Late the party, and actually found this thread googling around for “Org-mode file/organization strategies.” I’ve been using Org exclusively for work notes, and am finding myself in a similar situation re. being unwieldy. I constantly struggle with choosing one file per project, one big file with one headline per project, or files dedicated by type (one for todos, one for daily journal logs of experiments/efforts, references, etc.).
Org seems like it should be great for moving stuff around, but I find it not that easy. Refiling a mess of headlines seems to be cumbersome, and how do I know that my new strategy will last/work?
I’d love to know how Evernote solves the unwieldy issue for you. I’ve tried Evernote, Wunderlist, TiddlyWiki, todo.sh, Zim, and I’m sure others I’m not remembering.
What I’ll never give up is the ability to intersperse prose and code. I love, love, love writing all my work reports with embedded R code for analyses in Org-mode, exporting to really nice looking PDF reports. Super awesome, and soooo easy vs. writing all the code elsewhere to generate plots and then inserting them one by one into a ppt. In that respect, Org is awesome. I just haven’t figured out an information hierarchy/taxonomy that makes me happy.
It looks like I wrote the grandparent comment over two years ago and I am still primarily using Evernote and Nozbe. Evernote is invaluable for its ability to capture practically any form of information very quickly and then search it later. I can also intersperse “capture” items like reminders with “work” items like drafts of writing.
Nozbe is a fully functional GTD application and it’s the backbone of how I manage my tasks.
Theoretically org-mode is great because it combines capture with workspace, but in practice I always found it impossible to smoothly transfer between those two functions.
I tried the Android app just after I read your comment (it’s a thing I’ve been putting off for a long time), well… it really doesn’t include the “creating nested outlines easily” part I like org-mode for, and the synchronization part also seems to be kind of… strange. Just as you said.
What I really like about it is the minimum effort that it needs to, for example, create a todo item (compared with web-based solutions). Too bad that these todo items usually end up really unorganized. Would be indeed nice to have some interface between, e.g. Nozbe and org-mode, and use each of them for the task it is better suited for.
(I also agree with your point about learning emacs really well… or in my case, at a relatively acceptable level :))
I have probably sunk something like 300 hours in org-mode and ultimately abandoned it in favor of a system incorporating Evernote and Nozbe. Org-mode has been a source of much frustration for me. It seems so great, it seems to have all the features one could ever want, but every time I’ve tried to implement it (three separate attempts, each time starting from scratch and thinking I knew “what I was doing wrong last time,”) the system has grown huge and unweildly, leaky and unreliable, and missing key features that I needed.
On the plus side I learned how to use emacs really well.
edited to add: The iPhone app is pretty bad, for the following reasons: It is ugly and navigation is unintuitive, and the text-wrapping is essentially broken. Furthermore, you have to manually synchronize every little thing you do both pushing and pulling to your central repository or you’ll quickly end up with inconsistencies which are a disproportionately huge pain to correct.
I actually still use org-mode if I’m simply going to be outlining a complicated project, but I’ve given up on using it as a task manager. I really wanted to like org-mode.
Late the party, and actually found this thread googling around for “Org-mode file/organization strategies.” I’ve been using Org exclusively for work notes, and am finding myself in a similar situation re. being unwieldy. I constantly struggle with choosing one file per project, one big file with one headline per project, or files dedicated by type (one for todos, one for daily journal logs of experiments/efforts, references, etc.).
Org seems like it should be great for moving stuff around, but I find it not that easy. Refiling a mess of headlines seems to be cumbersome, and how do I know that my new strategy will last/work?
I’d love to know how Evernote solves the unwieldy issue for you. I’ve tried Evernote, Wunderlist, TiddlyWiki, todo.sh, Zim, and I’m sure others I’m not remembering.
What I’ll never give up is the ability to intersperse prose and code. I love, love, love writing all my work reports with embedded R code for analyses in Org-mode, exporting to really nice looking PDF reports. Super awesome, and soooo easy vs. writing all the code elsewhere to generate plots and then inserting them one by one into a ppt. In that respect, Org is awesome. I just haven’t figured out an information hierarchy/taxonomy that makes me happy.
It looks like I wrote the grandparent comment over two years ago and I am still primarily using Evernote and Nozbe. Evernote is invaluable for its ability to capture practically any form of information very quickly and then search it later. I can also intersperse “capture” items like reminders with “work” items like drafts of writing.
Nozbe is a fully functional GTD application and it’s the backbone of how I manage my tasks.
Theoretically org-mode is great because it combines capture with workspace, but in practice I always found it impossible to smoothly transfer between those two functions.
I tried the Android app just after I read your comment (it’s a thing I’ve been putting off for a long time), well… it really doesn’t include the “creating nested outlines easily” part I like org-mode for, and the synchronization part also seems to be kind of… strange. Just as you said.
What I really like about it is the minimum effort that it needs to, for example, create a todo item (compared with web-based solutions). Too bad that these todo items usually end up really unorganized. Would be indeed nice to have some interface between, e.g. Nozbe and org-mode, and use each of them for the task it is better suited for.
(I also agree with your point about learning emacs really well… or in my case, at a relatively acceptable level :))