Simple Planning With Plain Text

Gina Trapani wrote a series of articles at Lifehacker.com (see below) where she kept a "to do list" in a plain text file named todo.txt. A couple scripts help folks use it. My daddy always told me to put dates on everything. So I changed her format around just a bit.

Portability

Why use "plain text" files? "Plain text" really means ASCII. The main reason is portability. Such files can be read by some program on pretty much any computer. One can haul the plan (and supporting scripts) around on a USB stick.

Readability

This is a red herring. If one means readable by machine, then you're really talking about portability. If one means readable by humans, then you need a program to display the file. Sophisticated programs can make a file more readable, at the expense of portability.

Plan Format

I suppose any file name would do, but I like "plan.txt".

The Basics

date {time|importance} blather

Dates should be of the sortable form yyyy-mm-dd. Times should be hh:mm, where hh goes from 00 to 23. Importance is A, B, C, D, or E.

1. Urgent
2. Important
3. Whimsical
4. Done
5. Abandoned

To Do

We now have the makings of a to do list where we can list chores. The date is the date we intend to do them. When a chore is done or removed the original date and importance should remain for audit.

Gina Trapani recommends noting projects and contexts in chores. Projects are encoded as p:project. Contexts are encoded as @context.

Calendar

If we have time instead of importance then it is an event or appointment.

Display

Note that this format makes it pretty easy to sort and to grep for a date, month, or item. e.g. grep "^2006-05" plan.txt | sort.

Commands (Scripts)

Custom commands should not be necessary. However some convenience might be appreciated. We try to keep the number of programs needed to a minimum for maximum portability. These programs should already be installed on Linux, Cygwin, and Mac OS X: awk, date, expr, grep, sed, sort, and test.

Note that plan.txt should be sorted for this to work properly. Hence newchore.sh and didchore.sh sort their results. These scripts also copy plan.txt to plan.bak.txt to allow (single level) "undo".

• chores.sh [[-]n|date] <plan.txt
  If n is negative show from n days ago on into the future. If n is non-negative show from today on into the future to the n'th day. NOTE: the integer option will not work on some systems (Darwin (Mac OS X), FreeBSD, OpenSolaris). It needs GNU date which is in Linux and Cygwin. If date is given show from that date on into the future. The default is from today on. All active chores are shown even if they are older than the start date of the report.
• chores.py [startdate [enddate]] <plan.txt
  Like chores.sh this filters plan text to show what to do today. It takes two optional dates. You can create links to it to show common time periods:

  ln -s chores.py plans     # Shows from now on into the future.
  ln -s chores.py yesterday
  ln -s chores.py today     # Shows just what's on deck for today.
  ln -s chores.py tomorrow
  ln -s chores.py lastweek
  ln -s chores.py thisweek
  ln -s chores.py nextweek
  ln -s chores.py lastmonth
  ln -s chores.py thismonth
  ln -s chores.py nextmonth
      

• newchore.sh [date] [A|B|C|time] blather
  The default for date is today. The default for the second parameter is "B". In order for time to be recognized it must be formatted as mentioned above hh:mm.
• didchore.sh pattern [blather]
  Here pattern would be a regular expression that would match your targeted chore. This will add today's date and "D" to indicate done. It will also append the text blather to the end of the chore. So if you have a space in your pattern don't forget to quote the pattern. Create a soft link to didchore.sh named abandon.sh and "E" will indicate that the task has been abandoned. You should test your pattern with a simple grep first just to see what might be marked as done. Don't mark appointments as done.
• archiveplan.sh [-n|date]
  Move past appointments and done chores to past.txt. Like chores.sh leave undone chores in plan.txt even if they were added in the past. This first copies plan.txt to plan.bak.txt (obliterating the old plan.bak.txt).
• plan2ics.sh <plan.txt >plan.ics
  converts your plan to the iCalendar standard for use with calendaring programs like KDE's Korganizer, Apple's iCal, and Microsoft's Outlook.
• birdseye.sh Gina's Birdseye
  gives a snapshot of progress. The commands plan2todo.awk and plan2done.awk will create the files todo.txt and done.txt which can then be fed into birdseye.py to create the snapshot done by Gina. Of course, todo.txt could also be fed into her todo script, but there is no way to get modifications back into plan.txt. Gina's birdseye.py requires Python which may need to be installed separately if you don't already have it.

Try this to update your finger .plan Unix file from your plan.txt file: chores.py <plan.txt | grep -v " @home " >~/.plan.

For that "full screen" effect, newchore.sh and didchore.sh have commands at the end to clear; chores.py <plan.txt.

It can be helpful to print the list on paper which can then be carried around. I use a notebook with pages that are eight inches tall and 5.5 inches wide. Use cat past.txt plan.txt | awk -f spacer.awk | mpage -2P -bLetter -m40l -I1 to print so that the result can be folded in half, trimmed, and tucked into the notebook.

Vim

Here is some vimscript for new chores and done chores. Put it in your ~/.vimrc if you like. Don't forget to :%!sort when you're done. You can also :%!./plans or one of the other links. Of course, you should undo after that to restore plan.txt before making any more changes.

nnoremap <silent> <leader>s :%!sort<CR>

function! NewChore()
  let failed=append(line("."), strftime("%F") . " B ")
  +1 " Go to first non-space character of the newly inserted line.
  :startinsert! " Start inserting at the end of the line.
endfunction
nnoremap <silent> <leader>n :call NewChore()<CR>

function! DidChore()
  execute "normal 0i" . strftime("%F") . " D "
endfunction
nnoremap <silent> <leader>d :call DidChore()<CR>

Someday Baby

• Would it be useful to be able to mark past events as attended, cancelled, or missed?
• Shouldn't chores.sh automatically use plan.txt just as the other scripts do? Maybe it should, now that we have chores.py.
• Maybe chores.sh could automatically move old stuff from plan.txt to past.txt? This is what archiveplan.sh does now. So maybe chores.sh is no longer needed. The past could be further split by year like so: grep "^2005-" past.txt >past.2005.txt && grep -v "^2005-" past.txt >past.temp.txt && mv past.temp.txt past.txt
• Have the archiver put things in plan.year.txt.
• Maybe add a duration for events after the time field? e.g. 15m or 2h? Or end time?
• A history file and an undo command would also be convenient.
  Of course, RCS would do for this purpose.
• Maybe an ics2plan to get stuff from Korganizer or iCal.
• Use getopts? No Cygwin doesn't have such. Dang!
• Journal entry? Would still be one line. Maybe with a "J" instead of priority? Nah!
• Should we allow comments and blank lines? Comments might start with a hash. Would have to strip them before doing things like sorting. Nah!

What Next

whatnext.py is a script to help decide among candidate projects. It takes a list of projects with the first two columns indicating benefit and cost. The list is then ordered by "bang for the buck" by dividing benefit by cost. You can make gross estimates of these numbers, perhaps one to three or one to ten. Just remember that nothing is free (no zero cost).

Gina Trapani's Work

• Geek to Live: List your life in .txt
• Geek to Live: Script your life in .txt
• Geek to Live: Reader-written todo.txt manager
• The Todo.txt Command Line Interface (CLI)

http://www.BlossomAssociates.net/Plan/index.html 2006-05-23