Haha I wasted like two days trying to get into the norang person’s org-mode flow. I ended up learning the most from these two resources by Sacha:
http://sachachua.com/blog/2007/12/emacs-getting-things-done-with-org-basic/
http://emacslife.com/baby-steps-org.html
I love how simple her method is – you just stuff all of your tasks in ~/organizer.org so they aren’t scattered across all of your different project files. It’s much easier to keep track of things this way.
I feel like, generally speaking, norang’s methodology is much more scalable in the long term. I am able to keep roughly 2000 active entries (across both tasks, events, notes and long form writing) and know where everything is and what their purpose is, where when I dumped in to a single organizer.org-type system, it quickly become not only disorganized, but also way too slow to be useful.
Norang is more or less a way of life, which is both good and bad depending on how you slice it. I like how versatile it is, the sort of freedom-in-chains kind of way of thinking where, when you adhere to a system, it takes over and leaves you with the core of what you are trying to do.
I agree with that. One thing to note @samer, is that while Sacha’s
posts are simple and intuitive, they’re meant as an introduction. I
hope that after a couple of months of working with your current
org-mode workflow, you check out Norang’s document again, and compare
it with your workflow. See what you like and don’t like from your
current workflow, and what you can take from Norang’s document.
Actually, that’s what almost drove me away from org-mode. The
unstructured nature of org-mode when you first encounter it is
massive, and you end up getting lost about what to do first with what
the suite provides you. It was until reading Norang’s document that
each element of the org-mode suite (agenda, capture, clock, links,
etc…) started to fit in like legos.