Record Org-Mode Recent Activity
So I checked the notion tool recently. It’s pretty good if everyone around use it. But as an emacs user, I still prefer org-mode.
It’s just there’s one functionality I never thought about when I was using org-mode, the ability to record your activity. Like when you reschedule something or change the state of tasks.
I did some search online and came up with a solution. I’m pretty sure there’s better ways to do so. I’ll just put the codes here. It leverages the org-agenda-custom-commands and the :LOGBOOK: feature. And the code is mainly from here with some modification.
;; enable the log feature
(setq org-log-into-drawer t)
(setq org-log-reschedule 'time)
(setq org-log-redeadline 'note)
(setq org-log-note-clock-out t)
;; add T: before timestamp for easy regex search
(setq org-log-note-headings '((done . "CLOSING NOTE T:%t")
(state . "State %-12s from %-12S T:%t")
(note . "Note taken on T:%t")
(reschedule . "Rescheduled from %S on T:%t")
(delschedule . "Not scheduled, was %S on T:%t")
(redeadline . "New deadline from %S on T:%t")
(deldeadline . "Removed deadline, was %S on T:%t")
(refile . "Refiled on T:%t")
(clock-out . "Clocked out on T:%t")))
(defun +org/find-state (&optional end)
"Used to search through the logbook of subtrees.
Looking for T:[2018-09-14 Fri 10:50] kind of time stamp in logbook."
(let* ((closed (re-search-forward "^CLOSED: \\[" end t))
(created (if (not closed) (re-search-forward "^:CREATED: \\[" end t)))
(logbook (if (not closed) (re-search-forward ".*T:\\[" end t)))
(result (or closed logbook created)))
result))
(defun +org/date-diff (start end &optional compare)
"Calculate difference between selected timestamp to current date.
The difference between the dates is calculated in days.
START and END define the region within which the timestamp is found.
Optional argument COMPARE allows for comparison to a specific date rather than to current date."
(let* ((start-date (if compare compare (calendar-current-date))))
(- (calendar-absolute-from-gregorian start-date) (org-time-string-to-absolute (buffer-substring-no-properties start end)))))
(defun +org/last-update-before (since)
"List Agenda items that updated before SINCE day."
(let ((next-headline (save-excursion (or (outline-next-heading) (point-max)))))
(let* ((subtree-end (save-excursion (org-end-of-subtree t)))
(subtree-valid (save-excursion
(forward-line 1)
(if (and (< (point) subtree-end)
;; Find the timestamp to test
(+org/find-state subtree-end))
(let ((startpoint (point)))
(forward-word 3)
;; Convert timestamp into days difference from today
(+org/date-diff startpoint (point)))
(point-max)))))
(if (and subtree-valid (>= subtree-valid since))
next-headline
nil))))
(defun +org/has-child-and-last-update-before (day)
(if (+org/has-child-p) (point)
(+org/last-update-before day)))So now we can use the +org/last-update-before or +org/has-child-and-last-update-before function in org-agenda-custom-commands to filter activities updated since SINCE days ago. Like this.
(setq org-agenda-custom-commands
'(("R" "Recent activity"
((tags "*"
((org-agenda-overriding-header "Recent Activity")
(org-agenda-skip-function '(+org/has-child-and-last-update-before 7)))))
nil nil)))The code will only search for timestamps in :LOGBOOK: prefixed with T: or :CREATED: or :CLOSED timestamps. It works fine and helps me sometimes. Maybe I should write a agenda sort function to let them ordered by changed time. Fine for me right now.
UPDATE: 2018-09-24 If anyone interested in automatically recoding changes of headings, you may want check this stackoverflow question. The answer gives a method using hash to record last modification time of any changes in headings or even body.
September 17, 2018 org-mode emacs