I have stared to use Org’s clocking feature— a feature that helps tracking the time worked on a specific task. As everything in Org mode and Emacs, this feature is enabled through a series of functions, configuration options, variables, and bindings.

After using it for a couple of weeks, I have noticed that I am usually performing two actions one after the other:

• switch the task into “WIP” state
• clock-in

Would it be possible to automatically perform these two actions together? It’s Emacs and I assumed the default answer is yes.

Jeff Huang in “My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file”

I gave up and started just tracking in a single text file and have been using it as my main productivity system for 14 years now. It is so essential to my work now, and has surprisingly scaled with a growing set of responsibilities, that I wanted to share this system. It’s been my secret weapon.

I liked this article not only for its emphasis on simplicity and what-it-works for the author.
It also bringing up many advantages of text-based taks managers; something I only alluded to in my post as a reason from moving from Workflowy to Org mode.

As of today, I am aware of 4 (four) text-based task management systems:

1. Org Mode for Emacs
2. todo.txt
3. Taskwarrior
4. Neorg for Neovim

Since week 6 of 2024, I am back to using Org Mode, after using Workflowy for the last couple of years. The move to Org was not caused by any major deficiency in Workflowy. Nor thanks to some unique feature of Org Mode.

In a way, I believe the main reason was that I wanted ownership and control. And I was prepared to accept the learning curve and having to invest some work into making some not-quite-clear-solutions work.