Using Orger to populate your tasks list [see within blog graph]

This one I have been sustainably using for almost a year now, so I believe it could be useful to many people.

I tend to be curious about lots of different topics so I'm subscribed to over 100 subreddits.

For the most part I'm reading Reddit passively and I can't afford spending much time on Reddit every day, so my system for years has been: reading updates for the past week on Sundays.

For few select subreddits that most interest me (e.g. quantifiedself or orgmode) I read all updates, for the rest I just read weekly top.

I tend to do it from my phone on the go/in transport or while I'm waiting somewhere, so the concentration is not exactly perfect and many things are too awkward to read or browse on phone anyway.

So I tend to favorite interesting submissions (judging by the title) without reading them instead, and later once in a while when I'm at my desktop I have a deeper look at whatever I favorited.

This however gets a little clumsy.

• saved items can't be rearranged in the Reddit interface and the only sort available is by 'saving time'

  This would be ok if every time you processed your saved items you cleared all of them, but that's just not very realistic.

  Some things take higher priority; some things just give you few thoughts now and you wanna action on it later. So every time you process saved submissions, you end up going through same things all over again, and you have to remember where you stopped last time. That's quite distracting!

• you can't add private comments to saved items

  Using some annotation engine like Hypothesis on 'Saved' page would be too flaky if Reddit changes design. You could annotate saved items directly, but then you won't have an overview on 'Saved' page.

• sometimes posts/comments get deleted so if you look at saved item months later, you'd not know what have you saved anymore

  While there are ways to read removed reddit comments, it's a bit distracting to do too and with orger you'd always have an original version of the item.

How Orger solves that for me? Here's my typical workflow with reddit.org file:

• I'm running reddit data exporter and reddit.py every night automatically (via cron).
• when I feel like reading some Reddit, I open reddit.org and jump to new items at the end of file (I can quickly tell them from old ones since they don't have a priority), and go through them
• some things just get refiled immediately. E.g. if it's a recipe it would go to food.org, if it's something C++ related, it would go to cpp.org, etc.
• what isn't refiled, I mark with a priority
• when everything is prioritized, I select the whole file, call org-sort-entries and sort by priorities.

• now that everything looks a bit more manageable, I can action on the highest priority items (#A and #B) properly.

  Some I just read and archive.

  Some give me thoughts or ideas which I can add under the corresponding org-mode heading.

  Some things just require actually acting on them (e.g. new library release), so I can mark it as TODO and schedule so it shows up in my agenda.

• also, once in a while I'll look through items with lower (#C / #D) priorities and bump them or archive if they become irrelevant.

Needless to say when I'm searching through all of my Org-mode files, items saved on Reddit pop up as well.

The only downside of my particular implementation is that items are not unmarked as 'Saved' on Reddit. One could probably implement this with API call on archiving/marking item as done or something, I just didn't find it too big of a deal for me.

Here's how it looks for me (with content collapsed):

* TODO [#B] [2019-05-18 Sat 19:00] Refactoring in Spacemacs using iedit and helm-edit /r/spacemacs
...
* TODO [#B] [2019-09-02 Mon 12:41] Searching stories with super intelligence in humans theme /r/scifi :read:
...
* [#C] [2019-06-21 Fri 06:50] How do relationship fights affect men? /r/AskMen 
...
* [#D] [2019-01-15 Tue 08:30] Mind-Muscle Connection: What's the evidence? /r/bodyweightfitness 
...
* [2019-09-14 Sat 09:00] Kinesin, a motor protein, "walks" different proteins from one place to another /r/biology
...
* [2019-09-24 Tue 19:10] Why you should not blindly trust nutrition experts but instead self experiment. /r/Biohackers
...
* [2019-10-03 Thu 21:51] Is there an opensource decentralized search engine? /r/decentralization

Imagine a friend asked you for something, or sent you a link or a video, but you don't have time to process that right at the moment.

Normally I'd share their message to my TODO list app so I can process it later. However, official Android app for Telegram doesn't have sharing capabilities.

This is a tool that allows you to overcome this restriction by forwarding messages you want to remember about to a special private channel. Then it grabs the messages from this private channel and creates TODO items from it!

That way you keep your focus while not being mean ignoring your friends' messages.

I keep tags for the people I communicate most with (creepy I know :P ), so it also maps select people's names to tags, so I can quickly have an overview of things to discuss or reply to.

It would be fairly straightforward to modify the code for other instant messengers, although there are some potential issues. For instance, Whatsapp doesn't have an API. You can potentially web scrape it or reverse engineer the database on your phone to get messages, but I'm personally not motivated enough since I'm not using them much. Unless many people lack this, so let me know!

Sometimes when I'm annotating using Hypothesis, I want to think more about specific highlights, google more about them later or generally act on them somehow.

Normally you'd have to copy the URL, highlighted text and create a task from it.

This script does that automatically, only thing that you have to do is to mark it with a tag or type 'todo' in the annotation text.

Items get scheduled and appear on my org-mode agenda, so I can un/reschedule them if they don't require immediate attention.

Modules for Kobo and Instapaper work in the pretty much same way.

Automatically import stuff from my Kobo backups into org-mode for further spaced repetition (via org-drill in my case). Mainly learning vocabulary with it.

It uses kobuddy to extract data from Kobo exports.

The name stands for K[oboD]rill.

I'm using org-drill for Spaced repetition, but you could potentially use same principle to import cards in Anki or any other spaced repetition engine you like.

Here's how it looks for me:

* TODO yesterday [ Gestern ]                                          :drill:
  SCHEDULED: <2019-10-17 Thu>
:PROPERTIES:
:CREATED:  [2018-11-16 Fri 20:30]
:ID:       986e4686-75ec-40a9-9827-f9458bcb2811
:DRILL_LAST_INTERVAL: 200.7488
:DRILL_REPEATS_SINCE_FAIL: 6
:DRILL_TOTAL_REPEATS: 5
:DRILL_FAILURE_COUNT: 0
:DRILL_AVERAGE_QUALITY: 4.6
:DRILL_EASE: 2.8
:DRILL_LAST_QUALITY: 4
:DRILL_LAST_REVIEWED: [2019-03-30 Sat 21:27]
:END:
from Learn German with Stories: Café in Berlin - 10 short stories for beginners

* TODO disquieting                                                    :drill:
  SCHEDULED: <2019-09-29 Sun>
:PROPERTIES:
:CREATED: [2019-08-27 Tue 20:12]
:ID:       28652353-c905-46b1-b4a5-bc2daf71125d
:DRILL_LAST_INTERVAL: 9.2418
:DRILL_REPEATS_SINCE_FAIL: 3
:DRILL_TOTAL_REPEATS: 2
:DRILL_FAILURE_COUNT: 0
:DRILL_AVERAGE_QUALITY: 3.5
:DRILL_EASE: 2.36
:DRILL_LAST_QUALITY: 4
:DRILL_LAST_REVIEWED: [2019-09-20 Fri 00:17]
:END:
 from Worm

* TODO Plötzlich                                                      :drill:
  SCHEDULED: <2019-10-05 Sat>
:PROPERTIES:
:CREATED: [2019-10-04 Fri 14:19]
:END:
 from Learn German with Stories: Café in Berlin - 10 short stories for beginners

Last item was just appended after I connected my reader to computer, whereas two other have been there for a while.

Let me know what you think! I'm open to all feedback.