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2 Introduction

Planner is an organizer and day planner for Emacs. It helps you keep track of your pending and completed tasks, daily schedule, dates to remember, notes and inspirations. It is a powerful tool not only for managing your time and productivity, but also for keeping within easy keystroke reach all of the information you need to be productive. It can even publish reports charting your work for your personal web page, your conscience, or your soon-to-be-impressed boss.

In fact, because it uses as its building blocks simple plain-text files, it is an incredibly modular and flexible tool capable of shaping and handling your personal information in ways whose variety is limited only by your imagination. Because of this, Planner has a very active and generous community who regularly share their innovations with each other. Many of these modules and extensions are included in the archive that you will download. Once you get the basics down, you'll probably want to explore some of them. But as you read this manual and work with Planner, keep in mind that the basic core is actually very simple, and it might be worth spending time with just that before delving into the customizations.

Because they are plain text with very few requirements, the organizer pages kept by Planner can be as basic or as detailed as you like. Your pages can be simple to-do lists with no more additional information than what you would scrawl on a napkin, or they can be a highly technical affair involving hyperlinks, embedded Lisp code, appointment schedules and RSS feeds. As with so much in Emacs, it's all up to you.

To get started with Planner, you first need to download it, and possibly also the packages it depends on (see Installation).