Starting

Don't start with the tool; otherwise you'll end up trying to adapt your life to the tool, instead of the other way around. I'm currently starting over after a bit of a tiff with my .emacs file, which had grown too big and hard to manage.

This is known as "Emacs bankruptcy," but it's really just a way of evolving your system. Don't think of it as negative.

What's the data?

This time, I kinda asked myself, "What's the data I want to manage?" Then I can react to that data, let it drive my schedule, let it help me ideate, and so on.

I've had fancy setups with all kinds of nuance. Ten TODO states, dozens of tags. Made me feel clever, but didn't help me get batter. This time, I learned from that.

There are just a few places I need to worry about: home, work, shop, church, and yard. "Yard" is different because it depends greatly on the weather, which the rest -- for the most part -- do not. So I just made an org subdirectory in my homedir and added five files:

• home.org
• work.org
• shop.org
• church.org
• yard.org

I put a #+TITLE line in them, and then just started using Emacs and collecting things that go in these files. No pressure, no plan, just -- as I do things -- making a note of things I might need to do later, or things I want to do periodically.

And that's a really good starting point.