Org Mode – Organize Your Life in Plain Text

I've been an org mode user since 2012. When I started using it, I was learning emacs at the same time, really didn't know anything about lisp. But I had used a lot of other organizational systems going back to palm pilot days, I knew what I wanted. This website gave me everything I needed and I was able to start adding pieces one at time to my config file to get them working. It's a big part of my setup and I'm really grateful for the person who put it up that they did it (and kept it up to date) for a long time.

Inside the link to the .ofocus teardown you can see references to task parallelisation, along with "rankings", "project"-scopes and so on.

All of this is lost on export/import from .taskpaper, since there's no easy taskpaper representation of such data.

Representing this as a "backup" implies that it can be completely recovered, but that would certainly not be the case, this is an export, a new, lossy, representation of data.

That is also assuming that you consistently export to .taskpaper and not just rely on the default format - which is what everyone and there mum is going to be doing. Because consistently exporting to plaintext is not a common workflow.

I surprised myself when I stopped using org-mode when I "retired" (ha!) March 2019. At my last on-site job, I had to juggle managing a small deep learning team, work on 100+ US patents, and all of my own technical work and research. Org-mode was perfect to keep everything organized.

Now, I rely heavily on Apple Notes (this required discovering a little app that exports the notes for backup, and also realizing that I can use the web apps in iCloud.com on my Linux laptop).

This reliance on Notes may change however as just recently I have developed the habit of keeping a Mosh (like SSH) session always open between my iPhone and iPad to my remote server, with appropriate tmux setups for each device. I was just thinking yesterday about how I could now always keep a tmux pane open to emacs+org-mode.

I can feel this deeply because even though I'm an Emacs user, and thoroughly like the Emacs + Org experience, I was never able to keep a working system organized with Org mode.

I ended up using OmniFocus for my tasks and Notion for "information and note storing"; they have great, built-in support for the things I need to do and I spend very little time managing them and keeping them in order, so they simply do "what I need them for". They also play nice with mobile devices, images and external documents, and integrate with my Outlook calendar (something I am forced to use for work).

I have no doubt that a proficient Emacs user could create something similar, even better, using only Org mode; I don't use third party configurations and keep mine to one hundred lines, more or less; when things get more complicated, I notice that I mostly end up in a game of min/maxing without getting the same amount of "useful" that I get from other systems.

The big problem is that, the way I'm running now, I don't own my data; OmniFocus worries me particularly because, as already said in other comments, it's Apple-only. Notion worries me too: I wish them all the best, but what happens if they go out of business? Sure, I can export everything in plain text, but the structure of my data would be pretty hard to recreate in another system.

Even though configuration + Org files amount to some amount of complexity, I can have trust that their format is long lived and that they are stored where I decide. This is a sort of "peace of mind" I can relate with, and that I have somehow lost when I decided to use these other systems; however I am infinitely more satisfied with two systems that do "exactly what I want"; I hope to find a way to reconcile these ends sometimes, but for the moment Org mode is "only" my outlining tool of choice.

> low barriers to entry sometimes turn into barriers to growth at a later stage

I don’t happen to agree with this in the specific case of org-mode, but it’s a useful generic insight.