Planner is a plain-text hyperlinked personal information manager for Emacs that helps you keep track of tasks, notes, and other information. People use Planner to support different ways of planning one's day, from Franklin-Covey and David Allen's Getting Things Done to home-brew hacks. Planner is even used to manage information not normally handled by a personal information manager, like bugtracking, time tracking, and team data. If you start by using Planner as a basic TODO and notes manager, you might find other ways it can help you improve your process.
You can use Planner to keep track of your tasks, schedule, notes,
and other information you want to store in hyperlinkable text files.
You can get the most benefit out of a personal information manager if
you use it everyday. Most people add (plan) to the end of their
~/.emacs so that Planner shows today's schedule and
unfinished tasks whenever Emacs starts. If you leave your Emacs
running for more than 24 hours, try to get into the habit of running
plan at least once a day.
Because your time is important, Planner tries to minimize distractions, making it easier for you to jot down tasks and notes without being distracted from your work. People often make tasks based on the current buffer, so Planner tries to create hyperlinks to whatever you're looking at so that you can jump back to it easily. The Getting Started tutorial will show you how to set that up for both tasks and notes.
The customizability of Planner means you can make your personal information manager truly personal. Planner strives to be as flexible as possible, and we would love to adapt Planner to fit your needs. Browse through our mailing list (see Getting Help) to find out how other people are using Planner, and post your feature requests and bug reports there!
Planner is just a tool. It does not dictate a particular way of planning, although it supports some ways better than it supports others. If you want to take some time thinking about planning, read the following reflections for inspiration and ideas. On the other hand, if you want to hit the ground running, see Getting Started. If you already have a specific way of planning in mind, check out Sample Configuration Files.