Org Mode

DO NOT do any detailed time-management. It is as wasteful as being an ADHD /busybody – always busy, preoccupied and overwhelmed with useless bullshit.

Capturing of information and organized note taking is what it is all about.

All the silly “second brain” and “brain dump” memes are onto something, at least about systematic and organized writing everything down for an older you.

A “richly” structured (and deeply nested) plain text, decorated with KEYWORDS, TAGS and PROPERTIES, which can be exported to many formats without a loss of strucure or formatting. This is the underlying principle.

Configuration is done using nested list structures and macros, which together form an embedded declarative DSL, which the right thing to do.

Nothing clarifies the mind better that writing.

Lamport’s quote about writing goes here.

Plain text is good medium, but it does not have enough structure. Words, sentences, paragraphs and whole articles are enough for a prose, but technical writing requires more structure.

Lists are the most fundamental way in which a human mind (a mind of an external observer) arranges its concepts. By writing down a list of items the mind focuses itself, and by comprehending a whole list at once the mind could see a bigger picture.

A simple list sorted by implicit priorities is a half of any planing system. A single glance over it tells a lot. The ability to quickly re-arrange such a list according to the current circumstances (changing priorities) is another third.

Org-mode is about nesting and folding.

Deeply nested lists reflect the structure of knowledge (from the most abstract and general, to more detailed and specialized and all the way down to particulars). It allows the mind to easily traverse any selected branch of the whole hierarchy up and down.

Folding allows the mind to focus at a particular level - to narrow it down to a necessary level of abstraction.

Org-mode improves one’s writing, because it prompts the mind to arrange their concepts in natural hierarchical, tree-like structures (remember, that evolution is a tree, and a deeply nested list is a tree).

There is no rigorous thinking (or writing) without founding the reasoning on an appropriate branch of mathematics. Without formal mathematical models (however simple) any thinking is sloppy, biased towards your naive assumptions and wishful.

Math is easy to write in Org-mode - it allows to embed the standard LaTeX syntax almost everywhere. To see the result one has to render the resulting document using LaTeX or any other tool (such as MathJax).

Org-mode allows embedding of source code blocks in almost any language, and even to evaluate these code blocks within a document. The most important aspect is that the code is an additional, refined structure for domain knowledge.

You can export your structured writing into all the reasonable formats - HTML, Makrdown, LaTex, PDF.

Just use the structural and folding features and leave the time planing aspect to useless managers. You will see improvements in a couple of weeks, if not days. Everything that disciplines mind is good for you.