Why I am interested in emacs and org mode

One of my interests over the last few months is using the emacs editor and the org mode to change my work flow, keep my projects and todo lists sorted out and as the centre for all of my various writing projects : blogs, technical, fiction and emails. It felt difficult to work with but I have persevered, thanks to a few good blogs, I know use it everyday for more and more use cases and I have only scratched the surface of what it can do for me.

I intend to make my productiveplaybook.com blog a centre for getting started and developing the use of emacs but I will leave here a couple of links that helped me greatly. Check them out and maybe dip your toe in, the water is lovely.

http://emacslife.com/baby-steps-org.html

http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html

Pseudocode and Use Cases

I am a  Business Analyst/Project Manager hybrid by day and often I have to write use cases for systems I am working on. Simply put, a use case describes a need and then how to go about fulfilling that need. It has structure and uses specific words to indicate what is happening to whom.

An example might be….

As a person, I get hungry regularly, I need to eat to satisfy that hunger as a result I can function well for another period of time.

Here are the key points highlighted:  As a person, I get hungry regularly, I need to eat to satisfy that hunger as a result I can function well for another period of time.

who (person), what (eat), result (function well)

There are some awful parts to that sentence that would cause problems if I left it at that. I work in software development with programmers and they would rightly challenge the language in that use case as imprecise.

We would need to define:  hungry, regularly, eat, satisfy, function, well and period of time.

What Do I Use For Writing Posts Like This?

I thought it might be useful to outline how I write a blog. This is about the process not the content. I will take you through the steps from idea to publish and the tools I use and why I use them.

Stage 1 – The List

It all starts with an idea and in line with best GTD (Getting Things Done) practice, this idea needs a home – or it will be forgotten.  I use Evernote as my main note taking / clipping application and I have a “Blog Post” notebook in Evernote with a post called “Ideas and Schedule”.

So I add the idea to the ongoing list (currently I have 58 on this list) which gives it a number and puts it in sequence.

An idea may sit there for days or months before it gets picked and taken to the next stage – Outlining.

Stage 2 – Outlining

I outline in Evernote and outlining means taking the idea and augmenting it with words, phrases and ideas that I want to incorporate. So for example for this post the outline might include the words :  process not content, list management, outline, draft, edit, schedule, publish.

These are just words that help me define the scope of the blog post and from it I sometimes rework the idea into two separate blog post ideas or I take it to the next stage.

Incomplete Writing

This is not my original idea. I saw it on problogger recently but as someone who is writing documents all the time in my day job and sometimes fiction I appreciate the idea that we shouldn’t stop writing and disrupt our own flow when we write.

This concept is to write with a placeholder of TK or tk wherever we find we need a fact or need to finish a sentence.


It works like this. I may be writing and need to put a fact into this sentence but I don’t know how many people TK live in China so I write TK at that point in the sentence. I may also find I am missing the end of my TK. That was hard to write! But it was easy to type TK. I will then come back to all the instances of TK in my work and go through them replacing them with the real words.

So why TK… well it stands for “to come” ….oh no it doesn’t, to come would be TC…. yes but TK is a letter combination that never occurs in normal English writing and so it is easy to pickup with the find/replace function in your word processor of choice.

I haven’t used it much in blogging, I use it a lot at work in writing business analysis documents and reports. TK has allowed me to get and write most of a report without having to stop and get a statistic or a fact or a reference at the time of an initial draft of a document.

Try it…it works.

TK and How It Can Help The Flow Of Your Writing

This is not my original idea. I saw it on problogger recently but as someone who is writing documwnts all the time in my day job as well as three blogs and sometimes fiction I appreciate the idea that we shouldn’t stop writing and disrupt our own flow when we write. This concept is to write with a placeholder of TK or tk wherever we find we need a fact or need to finish a sentence.

It works like this. I may be writing and need to put a fact into this sentence but I don’t know how many people TK live in China so I write TK at that point in the sentence. I may also find I am missing the end of my TK. That was hard to write! But it was easy to type TK. I will then come back to all the instances of TK in my work and go through them replacing them with the real words.

So why TK… well it stands for “to come” ….oh no it doesn’t, to come would be TC…. yes but TK is a letter combination that never occurs in normal English writing and so it is easy to pickup with the find/replace function in your word processor of choice.

I haven’t used it much in blogging, I use it a lot at work in writing business analysis documents and reports. TK has allowed me to get and write most of a report without having to stop and get a statistic or a fact or a reference at the time of an initial draft of a document.

Try it…it works.

A Change Of Theme and A Blogging Initiative

I have changed the theme of this blog from the minimalist with lots of white space – illustratr. (Yes that is how it is spelt) to the more friendly reddle. These are both free themes available from wordpress.com.

I liked the earlier theme but unfortunately it only allowed widgets in a hidden panel just above the footer. You didn’t see it right? To see it you have to click on the triangle with the plus sign at the bottom of the page. Plus some of my posts are short, I believe in brevity where it is appropriate, short posts look tiny with all that white space.

I may keep Reddle, the new theme, but I have my eye on two other themes to try so expect it to change again a couple of times before it settles down.

You will have noticed a small graphic in the right hand panel with the slogan “500 words” this is part of an initiative my jeff goins to help bloggers with a free course and a challenge. It is a sort of nanomowri idea where we participants try to improve our blogging and part of it is to write 500 words per day.

In the past I have done this for myself. From November 2013 to June 2014 I get statistics on my writing and averaged 500 a day, although that meant some days not writing and some when I would write 2000 words in one go. This current initiative is for 500 words a day every day. The idea is to develop the habit. The words can be blog posts like this one or other pieces but not emails. Just as well as most of my emails are under 50 words.

Writing is a discipline and it gets better and easier with more practice. Go to jeffgoins.com to see how he is managing his gang of improving bloggers.