Assorted feedback from an experienced org user

[ParetoOptimalDev]

Pros:

• The workflow is very well thought out, the demonstration video going through each piece is magnificient!
• org-gtd-review-area-of-focus is super valuable to get a glance at the status of high level areas of focus
• Despite my annoyance at first, the workflow of org-gtd-process-inbox only showing one item to process at a time is great and prevents overwhelm that my typical "entire list of things in inbox" agenda view can incite.
• interactivity of marking the next item NEXT after one item in a project is done helps motivate action. I had this in my homegrown system too!
• Actually has an info manual omg thank you info manuals are so underappreciated

Cons:

• Scheduling doesn't with C-c C-s or deadlines doesn't work. For some reason org-gtd uses active/inactive timestamps instead
• g (or org-agenda-redo-all) in emacs 29 in the engage buffer reached from org-gtd-engage does not preserve org-gtd variables and makes agenda engage view blank instead of refreshing (workaround: call org-gtd-engage)

Questions:

• How are large amounts of NEXT items handled? Priorities?
• Same question for many projects. In my system I had to add a notion of active/inactive projects.

Great job on what you've created! It'll likely be my default suggestion in the future to people who want to use org and anything resembling GTD.

[bbigras]

Scheduling doesn't with C-c C-s or deadlines doesn't work. For some reason org-gtd uses active/inactive timestamps instead

I have questions about this too. Does all the org repeat with with org-gtd? What about org-habits?

[ParetoOptimalDev]

@bbigras I don't know for sure, we'll have to wait for trevoke to get back/get time to see this.

However my assumption is that similar to the org-roam v1 to v2 migration many features with some work could re-use more core org-mode features and be more compatible with the ecosystem.

Note: That's not to denigrate the great software and UX trevoke has put together, just to mention what seems to be an enhancement opportunity.

[Trevoke]

Hello!

Sorry about the long delay, I was off away from the internet, then came back and got sick (isn't that the way it always goes).

Thank you for appreciating the work, it warms my heart to know that it doesn't go unnoticed :)

For the cons and questions:

Scheduling doesn't work

You're right, it doesn't! In org-mode, "scheduling" is specifically about when a project should be started; appointments are simple timestamps. I've elected to create a specific property for the timestamp in order to keep the body as clean as I could (unfortunately the timestamp is duplicated at the moment because some other tools, like orgzly, don't implement the parsing fully).

We should implement a command to allow setting a new date for an existing appointment.. Durn. That's a feature I missed. Would you mind opening an issue specifically for that?

g breaks

Yep. If you don't have org-gtd-mode enabled, unfortunately, due to the heavy mix of stateful and stateless required to build the org-agenda view, the commands that build the agendas can't "repeat". This has been a problem since the very first release of this package, and is likely to be the main reason I release an alternate version of the package which doesn't use any of its own variables -- which also means I probably won't be able to provide any decent support to people who have problems with it unfortunately, but ... can't have everything.

How are large amounts of NEXT items handled?

I mean... However YOU want? org-agenda views can be filtered with org-agenda-filter -- / for me -- or you can append additional views with org-agenda-append-agenda -- A for me.
Some views with filters by contexts are provided, which help you figure out what you may want to do that way. One upcoming feature involves implementing the four filters suggested by the GTD book, but ideally that's as seamless as possible, and reuses org-agenda features, instead of building something on top of it.

How are Priorities handled?

org-mode already provides support for that, and the best way in org-gtd to do that is through org-gtd-organize-hooks (and don't forget org-gtd-organize-type-member-p if you only want priorities to be added to specific types of tasks)

How are projects handled?

Ideally they're completely transparent to you when you choose to engage, and only show up through the NEXT task (unless it's meaningful to know specifically which projects are ongoing, as in the area of focus view), so the answer to the question right now is ... "They aren't". The only things you can do to a project are "add a task to a project" and "cancel a project". If you have specific things you'd like to do with projects, let me know, and maybe we can make a better tool :)

Does all the org repeat with with org-gtd?

Yep. org-repeat is just a modifier on a timestamp. Org-gtd tries very, very hard to reuse org-mode features wherever possible.

What about org-habits?

Org-habits, annoyingly, use the SCHEDULED keyword (see the very first answer I gave for why this is annoying) along with an org property on the task; I have a specific flow just for them. So the answer is... That's supported.

[Sabicool]

@ParetoOptimalDev @bbigras see a possible solution regarding org-gtd scheduling here #187. Could be an option to use this in addition with scheduling and deadlines where:

• The property ORG_GTD_TIMESTAMP could represent a specific time when something happens (i.e. calendar events)
• Org-mode scheduling could be reserved for scheduling TODOs (e.g. NEXT items) to start on a particular day or for setting a duration (e.g. when planning a day)
• Org-mode deadlines could be reserved for setting deadlines to tasks, projects etc

I believe this was the intention for how ORG_GTD_TIMESTAMP is to be used by Trevoke