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Our org-agenda setup and trying something new

<Anuma> Heh, guess I'll get to it. Today I plan to show you our setup with org-super-agenda, org-wild-notifier and org-habit to keep ourselves organized with Doom Emacs.

The setup

Part of the plan of this is try to change our habits for the better and stop being chronically online and depressed.

Installing the packages

First of all, we need to install the relevant org packages to our emacs, we will do this through the package! macro doom emacs offers. There is a file specifically meant for this purpose in the doom configs, packages.el.

packages.el

(package! org-wild-notifier)
(package! org-super-agenda)

Org-wild-notifier is a package that will send notifications to our notification server (in our case dunst). Meanwhile, org-super-agenda will change the main view of the agenda, we mainly use this to group different tasks. We also need to tell emacs in the config.el file to require org-habit.

config.el

(require 'org-habit)

The config

Our configuration is extremely basic, but for the purpose we use it, it works.

We define the org-wild-notifier configuration with the use-package! macro, it will make emacs initialize it when it launches, and asigns a style to send notifications, we recommend libnotify since it has always worked pretty well for us and is easy to use.

We will not use a keyword whitelist, and this is important because we want any scheduled task to be notified, we’ll also set a notification title and time (in minutes) for when it should be triggered. Multiple times can be specified, but we set only one, since we can add more in a per-task basis inside the org file where the task reside.

config.el

(use-package! org-wild-notifier
  ;;:ensure t
  :custom
  (alert-default-style 'libnotify)
  (org-wild-notifier-keyword-whitelist nil)
  (org-wild-notifier-notification-title "Agenda")
  (org-wild-notifier-alert-time '(10))
  :init
  (org-wild-notifier-mode t))

Equally as above, we declare a org-super-agenda setup with use-package!, all the variables are pretty much self explaining in this snippet, but I’d like to draw attention to org-agenda-start-with-log-mode and org-agenda-log-mode-items. These variables will enable the agenda to display alread done tasks, this may be annoying to some people, but I think it’s important that one can see the progress they make along the day.

config.el

(use-package! org-super-agenda
  :after org-agenda
  :init
  (setq org-agenda-skip-scheduled-if-done nil
      org-agenda-skip-deadline-if-done t
      org-agenda-include-deadlines t
      org-agenda-block-separator nil
      org-agenda-start-with-log-mode t
      org-agenda-log-mode-items '(closed clock state)
      ;;org-agenda-compact-blocks t
      org-agenda-start-day nil ;; i.e. today
      org-agenda-span 7
      org-agenda-start-on-weekday nil)

The most important variable to declare here, is org-super-agenda-groups, here is the reason we use this pacakge in particular, we want to organize all our tags in groups because it makes the information more digestible for us. This is our personal setup, but there are a lot of settings for more fine control of the categories, you can see them in the official repo.

config.el

  (setq org-super-agenda-groups
        '(;; Each group has an implicit boolean OR operator between its selectors.
          (:log t)
          (:name "Today"  ; Optionally specify section name
           :time-grid t  ; Items that appear on the time grid
           :todo "TODAY")  ; Items that have this TODO keyword
          (:name "Dailies"
                 :and (:category "Self care" :todo "TODO")
                 :order 0)
          (:name "Bimbofication"
                 :and (:category "Bimbofication" :todo "TODO")
                 :order 1)
          (:name "日本語"
                 :and (:category "Japanese" :todo "TODO")
                 :order 3)
          (:name "Class"
                 :category "Class"
                 :order 2)
          ))
:config
(org-super-agenda-mode))

Finally, we unbind the movement keys on the org-super-agenda keymap, since they have more priority than the emacs evil-mode, so by using the following snippet, we prevent them from conflicting.

config.el

(eval-after-load "org-super-agenda"
  '(progn
     (define-key org-super-agenda-header-map (kbd "j") nil)
     (define-key org-super-agenda-header-map (kbd "k") nil)
     (define-key org-super-agenda-header-map (kbd "h") nil)
     (define-key org-super-agenda-header-map (kbd "l") nil)))

<Anuma> And this would be it for the configuration! It's a pretty easy setup that takes barely any time.

<Junko> yeah, setting org-agenda up should be one of the first few things someone adds to their emacs setup, it's so comfy and useful. we even use it to handle task inside many files and projects, like the game we are making.

An example task in org mode

Be sure to remember to add the org file that has your tasks to the org-agenda, either through declared configuration or by using the C-c [ hotkey (by default in doom emacs).

This would be an example task in our org agenda file:

****<space>TODO HRT -- setting as todo

SCHEDULED: <2023-03-25 土 21:30 ++1d> -- scheduled date and time, after is done it's set to the next day after it was completed

:STYLE: habit -- will display the task habit, as a sort of "don't break the chain"

:WILD NOTIFIER NOTIFY BEFORE: 30 1 -- adds extra notifications half an hour and one minute before the scheduled time

The results

Trying something new

As you might have seen, we have a lot new tasks today, usually they were englobed in a generic self care rutine task, which we failed to do very regularly, we often find ourselves at a struggle to take care of our body. So starting today we will be diving the tasks into easy, fast and small sub-tasks that hopefully will make us more willing to get things done, even if it’s not all of it, every little bit we manage to work on ourselves is a big win for us.

<Alicia> We don't really have any problem with hygiene things. We mostly don't eat an actual decent meal for breakfast (out of laziness) and hair related activities in particular are very distressing to us.

<Anuma> Because of the sheer volume of hair we have, and the fact it's wavy, it tangles regularly and easily. Brushing our hair gets a little hard when it gets so tangled and causes us pain.

<Junko> yeah, untangling hair probably hurts for the majority of people unless we were doing something wrong all along, so it probably relates to tactile sensorial distress, which we have a lot of. it's one of the reasons we are so sensitive to food textures.

<Alicia> Washing our hair is not particularly a problem either? The problem with that is more of the untangling and drying that comes after, the heat and sound of the dryer get very annoying. And again because we have a lot of volume, we have to spend a lot of time to dry our hair.

<Anuma> The few times we have left it drying naturally, while it worked and wasn't really distrassing in any way we can think of at the moment, the hair looks undeniably worse after the fact.