Simple Planning With Plain Text

Gina Trapani wrote a series of articles at Lifehacker.com where she keeps a "to do list" in a plain text file. 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 newshore.sh and didchore.sh sort their results. Also many scripts 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.
• 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 blather
  Here blather would be a pattern (regular expression) that would match your targeted chore. This will add today's date and "D" to indicate done. Create a soft link to didchore.sh named abandon.sh and "E" will indicate that the task has been abandonded (or the event cancelled).
• 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.
• thisweek.sh lists chores done or scheduled for the current week.
• 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.sh | grep -v " @home " >~/.plan.

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

Someday Baby

• Some of these scripts seem slow (especially on Cygwin). Maybe AWK or Python versions would be faster (and simpler). e.g. chores.py.
• Shouldn't chores.sh automatically use plan.txt just as the other scripts do?
• 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 second parameter to chores.sh would make the two params be start and end.
• Maybe a direct AWK implementation of snapshot like Gina's birdseye.py.
• 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.
• No getopts command in Cygwin. 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).

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