Previous: Task Ranks, Up: Organizing Your Tasks


6.2.2.7 Grouping Tasks with planner-trunk.el

planner-trunk.el helps you automatically group tasks according to a set of rules. It sorts and splits your tasks, adding a blank line between groups of tasks. For example, if today's page looks like this:

     * Tasks
     
     #B   _ Buy milk (GroceryShopping)
     #B   _ Learn how to use planner-trunk (PlannerMode)
     #B   _ Buy a notebook (Bookstore)
     #B   _ Buy cereal (GroceryShopping)
     #B   _ Set up my own planner-trunk rules (PlannerMode)
     #B   _ Customize my stylesheet (MuseMode)
     #B   _ Go for a health checkup (BetterHealth)

then you might want to group the tasks into: planner and muse, shopping list, and other items. If you set up the appropriate rules by customizing planner-trunk-rule-list, planner-trunk.el can automatically rewrite that section line this:

     * Tasks
     
     #B   _ Learn how to use planner-trunk (PlannerMode)
     #B   _ Set up my own planner-trunk rules (PlannerMode)
     #B   _ Customize my stylesheet (MuseMode)
     
     #B   _ Buy milk (GroceryShopping)
     #B   _ Buy a notebook (BookstoreShopping)
     #B   _ Buy cereal (GroceryShopping)
     
     #B   _ Go for a health checkup

In this case, you would set planner-trunk-rule-list to (("." nil ("PlannerMode\\|MuseMode" "Shopping"))).

You can load planner-trunk with M-x load-library RET planner-trunk RET or add (require 'planner-trunk). If you're not yet comfortable with Emacs Lisp, you can use M-x customize-variable RET planner-trunk-rule-list RET to edit this rule using an easy-to-use interface.

WARNING: Do not keep non-task information in the Tasks section. planner-trunk will delete all non-task lines from the Tasks section of your plan page in the process of grouping the tasks.

After you set up planner-trunk-rule-list, use M-x planner-trunk-tasks to try out your rules until you're satistfied.

If you want to do this automatically, you can use (add-hook 'planner-mode-hook 'planner-trunk-tasks) to trigger it automatically whenever you open a Planner page.