tldr: C-x n s to narrow, C-x n w to widen
Now that life’s getting busier and busier, with lots more things on my plate, ye olde system of writing the day’s tasks down on paper does not work any more. Specially since, I’ve begun logging clock times1. Writing them down by hand is a giant pain.
This is what the plan’s begun to look like.
An unwieldy plan.
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I wanted to see, if Org would let me replicate what I did my hand, natively.
Which in a nutshell was to look at the day sheet (on paper) for the nitty gritty and my organiser (currently my tasks.org file) for the big picture view.
I bounce between the two often. And discrete focus is something I wanted to keep.
The focus from wide …
to narrow. And back …
A bit of searching and this is the result! Woohoo!
Like I mentioned above, I hit C-x n s next to my day’s headline to narrow the scope to just today. And a C-x n w gets me back to the thirty thousand foot view.
I think of them as, s for slim and w for wide, to keep them straight in my head.
I’m intuiting this is Org’s Sparse Tree Magic at play here. But learning that wizardry is a thing for another day.
The important bit for me, is that I can focus when I working, without getting distracted.
And then when I need to, zoom out to review what progress looks like and make changes, if I need to.
I feel a bit sad though. I’ve given up book notes on paper. I’m giving up planning my day on paper. It feels like I’m losing something tangible. I miss paper.
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I hope to use these, to objectively measure where my time is really going ↩︎