TODOSTACK.EL

[Originally   published   on   evanswin-
ner.com, 2011-05-14 Sat]

Of all forms  of  time-wasting,  writing
time-management  software  is  most sub-
lime.

For at least a certain  segment  of  the
population,  location  is  becoming less
and less important.  Once, we  went  out
to rent a movie at the local Plex, drove
to the grocery store for food, left  the
house  for  entertainment and of course,
to work.  Now we watch movies  streaming
on  Netflix,  order groceries (or pizza)
to be delivered from an online  service,
and   of   course,  more  and  more,  we
telecommute.  As the first three  dimen-
sions of place thus recede in importance
to our existence  we  become  freer  and
freer  to  focus  our  attention on that
most fundamental of our  lives’  parame-
ters, the fourth: time.

Philosophizing  aside,  my own tiny con-
tribution, posted at  EmacsWiki  Github,
is  todostack.el.  It is a set of inter-
active functions in Emacs Lisp which al-
low you to keep a simple to-do list as a
stack.  The idea was inspired by a  blog
post by one Shrutarshi Basu1 in which is
discussed the idea of using  a  priority
queue for a to-do list.  This seems like
a good or  at  least  interesting  idea.
Thinking about myself, it occurred to me
that my problem  is  that,  easily  dis-
tractible  as I am, I need a way to keep
track of what I am supposed to be doing,
that  will feed me one and only one item
at a time in the order  that  they  have
been  made the current highest priority.
I am a system administrator and this may
appeal  more to people with that sort of
job than to those with ...  other  sorts
of jobs.  In my work it seems that what-
ever is most recent is  most  important,
so  this  seems  to be useful to me thus
far.  When I finish a task I don’t  have
to  sit  around  wondering what it was I
was supposed to do  next,  or  that  had
been  interrupted.   I  simply  pop  the
stack and see what’s next.  I still  use
Org-mode  and  the  Org  Agenda  for  my
longer-term projects  and  to-do  lists,
but  for  a  time  scale  from about one
evening to a week  or  so,  todostack.el
seems  useful  so far.  The thing is ex-
perimental, so use at your own risk, and
so  forth;  read  the  commentary in the
headers.  There is some  Org-mode  inte-
gration, actually: you can output a buf-
fer full of your stack  as  an  Org-mode
TODO  list,  and  you  can also snarf up
such a buffer  into  your  stack,  so...
that’s nice, I guess.  Anyway, it’s only
lightly tested, and of course  only  for
my  uses  on  my systems, so it no doubt
has some bugs.  It’s also got  a  really
odd  doc-string hack which seemed like a
good idea at the time, but sort of  bal-
looned out a bit out of control.  At any
rate, for what it is worth, as they say.

Footnotes:               http://bytebak-
er.com/2009/12/02/im-leaving-google-
tasks/
 Evans Winner
 Albuquerque, New Mexico
 May, 2011