So, org-gtd makes heavy use of org-edna:

When you’re working down a project’s todos, each time one flips to DONE it triggers org-edna to move the next task into a NEXT state. So far so good and awesome if you’re just using Emacs.

If you’re out and about with your iPhone (or Orgzly, or whatever) and do not have a full Emacs environment, any state changes to a todo item won’t have org-edna there to monitor and make the needed state changes for the next item.

Today, for instance, I am going to be out and about running a few errands that include picking some things up that I need to complete a few projects. I have a custom view set up in BeOrg to show me my @errands items in NEXT state. When I stop by the motorcycle shop to pick up a battery for my Grom, I’ll want to tick that errand off as DONE. Because org-edna isn’t there, the next item in the “Get the Grom ready for summer” project won’t flip into a NEXT state, and org-gtd’s handy “next actions” agenda list will lose track of the project (unless I explicitly check for stuck projects – projects with no item in a NEXT state.)

David Masterson on the BeOrg user forum was grappling with the same problem and suggested a pretty good idea: Adding a transitional TODO state to BeOrg that you’d then manually flip to DONE once sitting in front of Emacs on a real computer. That’d then trigger org-edna and your list automation would be back on track. He proposed PRE-DONE, I just went with BEDONE:

(defun mph/org-change-bedone-to-done ()
  "Change all 'BEDONE' states to 'DONE' in current buffer."
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (while (re-search-forward org-heading-regexp nil t)
      (when (string= (org-get-todo-state) "BEDONE")
        (org-todo "DONE")))))

Then you’d just want to automate that:

(add-hook 'org-mode-hook 'mph/org-change-bedone-to-done)

The two additional bits of setup: Adding “BEDONE” to BeOrg’s list of todo states, and making sure it is also in the TODO state list in your Emacs config, or in the file you’re going to operate on. If you just try to use “BEDONE” instead of “DONE” without blessing it as an actual TODO state, the function will treat it like arbitrary text and ignore it.

My Grom example is pretty simplistic: I’m not going to forget I am trying to get the Grom ready for summer, and will eventually go looking for the rest of the project if I accidentally move it into a stuck, next-actionless state. But the whole point of org-gtd – GTD generally – is that you want to remove as much “holding stuff in your head” as possible.

The limits of hyper-automated plaintext primtivism

For the record, yes, this is pushing things. All sorts of things. The limits of hyper-automated plaintext primitivism. The willful naivete of GTD as a method. My own laziness, because the other option is to just write this stuff down and stick it in my pocket on the way out the door, or to not use BeOrg interactively if I’m going to have a bunch of desktop-only automation.

The only real defense I have right now is, “it’s fun.”

The only way to keep having this kind of fun will eventually be to either become a primitivist hyper-automation plaintext fetishism influencer with no need to do things like “direct corporate IT operations” or “lead product engineering groups;” or to crowd out other things in my life that matter much, much more than relieving myself of the drudgery of manually changing TODO states in a plaintext file.

A friend asked, “are you ready to go back?”

Yeah … seven months in, three of which were very deliberate rest, the rest of which have involved a state of relaxed calm but the stochastic cadence of screenings, interviews, and panels … I am ready: Rested, as clear on my purpose in the workplace as I have been in a long time, and as clear on what I am getting for my time as I have ever been. Uncle Tupelo for the rest.

There’s an org-mode bundle for MailMate that works pretty well: You invoke it, it drops an org-mode todo in a given file using the subject for the heading and a link to the MailMate message.

I added a bunch of messages with similar subjects and found it sort of hard to know which was which without opening them, so I made a small patch to the bundle that adds the name of the sender to the org heading. While I was in there, I made it a little easier to find the hardcoded file target and added it to the README instructions.

Here’s the fork, with all credit to Max Andersen, who wrote the original.

(MailMate previously. I ended up buying a license. I could do much of what I do with it with plain old macOS Mail.app, but MailMate is much easier to tune and ends up feeling more personalized.)

more org-gtd

I mentioned being not so happy about my liminal state. It was good to get org-gtd up and running because I was able to quit fussing with how to get everything out of my brain and just concentrate on getting it out of my brain. Therapeutic, even. It didn’t take long to start looking at a little of the other core GTD stuff, adding contexts and “Area of Focus” to all the stuff I got in there. org-gtd has some good agenda views that incorporate areas and contexts.

So, you know, it took a day or two to tour the options and figure things out for the next while and it’s just … good to be using the tool, not thinking about the tool. Which reminds me …

The dysfunctional embrace of Linux and Windows

My friend Ed reminded me a little about tool fixation with this pretty interesting video about the ways Windows’ bad UX infects Linux desktops:

My weird Electra Townie

I have an e-bike and love it for anything further than a couple of miles. Earlyish in lockdown I realized I had more time to get around the neighborhood during the day and went out looking for an acoustic bike. I was hoping for something sort of easygoing – upright ride, plush, didn’t need to be fast. In retrospect, what I was really looking for was some kind of Dutch bike.

Supply chain hell and demand made that tough, but my local Bike Gallery had a sort of weird, niche bike on the floor: An Electra Townie, but more tricked out than they usually are, and on super steep discount. It has front and rear racks, a dynamo hub, disc brakes, and it’s a 27-speed. It’s also sort of tall for a Townie. I just went to the Electra site to make sure I haven’t completely misunderstood what’s “normal” for a Townie. This thing is not normal, and I got it for less than their current cheapest model. I’m assuming it was an experiment in making a “pro” Townie of some kind that failed, so maybe they just dumped existing stock and got back to the simpler baseline.

I love it.

I test-rode a Townie a very long time ago … about the time all the bike manufacturers were in some sort of “nobody bikes anymore” crisis and were coming out with things like the Trek Lime with automatic shifters and relaxed geometries that wouldn’t “intimidate” people. Because I wanted something that could do a nine-mile commute, the Townies and Limes didn’t work for me: The forward-pedaling geometry made it hard to stand up on a hill, and they were geared in a way that made them feel like renting a U-Haul with a throttle governor.

This bike still has the forward-pedaling geometry and the relaxed, swept back handle bars. To get it to fit correctly I did have to move the seat forward more than I have on other bikes, so it seems like a bike that would stop being a good fit for anyone under 5'9" or so, but could accommodate someone around 6'2" or 3. In fact, Ben rode it comfortably and he was easily 6'1" or 6'2" at the time. Combined with the big seat and the inability to really lean forward and bear down, it’s content to live in the middle gears and just sort of roll along.

The built-in lights are probably best used to look for potholes at night, and you should have supplements for visibility. The front rack isn’t huge, but comfortably carries a box of Trader Joe wine. The rear rack is a little weird: It doesn’t seem to be compatible with any of the assorted fitment standards, including the Townie basket we got for Al’s Trek e-bike. But it works fine with an Ortlieb or Banjo Brothers panniers, and there’s always the milk crate treatment.

Oddities and almost-but-not-quite features aside, the thing I love about it is how upright and comfortable the ride is, and how smoothly it rolls on its largish wheels. I have taken it all the way downtown via both the Springwater and Clinton St. (8 and 6.5 miles, respectively) and it has been comfortable. You just can’t try to put too much through the drive train or crank up any hills. You don’t really corner with it: Turns are more like a kind of gliding swoop motion.

So it feels to me more or less like what I imagined the Dutch bike I wanted would feel like. Probably less efficient and more wasted power, but upright and easygoing. When I go around the neighborhood, up to Foster, over to Woodstock, or down the Springwater, it feels more like a sightseeing tour than a commute.

Anyhow, I’ve had it out for the first time in a little while over the past week and was reminded how much I enjoy it.

So, I gave Things a look, as threatened, and it just didn’t work for me. I wanted it to, but I really, really like the intermingling of text and action I get in org-mode. It felt stilted and weird to have actions out on a special action island, and I love the integration between org-mode, magit, and projects you get “batteries included” in Doom: SPC X p t and you add a todo linked to the current point in the project document you’re in, SPC p t and you get a list of all the todos in your current project.

So the next thing to do was try to figure out what wasn’t working for me with a relatively unstructured set of todos in org. The sense of tradeoffs between a purpose-built GUI and a text interface often hangs on what you can “just do” with a GUI and a limited vocabulary of keyboard commands, and what you have to just type out by hand in a text interface. The thing that had me looking at Things to begin with was the sense that I had some projects/tasks of moderate complexity that were hard to structure in a way that I could completely document the work without making my org-mode agendas cluttered and noisy.

Nick Anderson suggested org-edna as a way to add sequencing and dependencies, but it felt like more than I wanted to get into. Using it “naked” is more typing. Wrapping it in automation makes some sense, but the time investment felt foreboding. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I don’t want to orchestrate a bunch of things, I just want to have a narrow window into my list.

So I went down the rabbit hole of understanding how people do GTD in org-mode.

I am on the record as a GTD skeptic, less because of the worldview itself and more because of the culture that surrounds it. But I appreciate a few things about it:

1. Having a trusted system.
2. Knowing where your inbox is.
3. Always knowing what’s next, not feeling like you have to always know everything.

Items 1 and 2 are easy enough to solve for. I have a mobile inbox with beorg, and I have a desktop inbox with my org-mode config and an inbox.org file. Close enough.

Item 3 was what I wanted some help with: I was hoping to find an agenda recipe that would limit me to seeing projects and only their next actions. Because of the way people accrete functionality in org-mode, it got discouraging fast. It’s the classic conundrum: You want to get all your stuff organized, but first you must architect a solution involving org-mode and gobs of lisp and three other modules, then cobble a UI around it if you want to work efficiently.

But, I also came across org-gtd, which just hit version 3, and is a batteries included solution to doing GTD with org-mode, including a nice, constrained view of your next actions along with some “use it if you want, I’m not your mom” extra stuff from the GTD paradigm.

Some stuff I like about it:

1. Efficient capture
2. The ability to turn preexisting items in your org universe into org-gtd items
3. Tame agenda views of next actions
4. Peaceful coexistence with the rest of your org-mode setup

I did have a few challenges getting it working that seemed to come down to some weirdness in my custom.el file and a bad interaction with encrypted org-journal files. Once I bisected and cleared out the customizations and let them rebuild, it worked smoothly. It leverages org-edna without making you deal with org-edna.

It does the basics well enough that I’m interested in exploring some of the deeper GTD cuts with it.

Liminal state

But the other thing going on right now is that I am in another liminal state. It ought to resolve pretty quickly, but it’s the difference between “might have two quiet weeks ahead” or “might have five quiet weeks ahead,” and also “have you all seen what the hell is going on out there right now? omg the thought of sitting on ice for five weeks and hoping harsh macroeconomic realities don’t knock me to the bottom of the hill again …”

To the extent I am well resourced, have a plan, and have built in a lot of room to tolerate disruption, I’m fine. But I’m also incredibly well rested, ready to get moving into the next phase, and am having a wee struggle just being in the moment when I am not sure how much moment I have to be in, if that makes any sense.

I just went through and averaged the number of years I’ve spent at every job since I was 22. 5.33 years. When I include just the “no, now I’m really engaged in something called a profession” run of the past 20 years, it’s closer to eight years. The great thing about averaging eight years between changing jobs is that you only had to change jobs every eight years. The terrible thing about it is that you forget what it’s like to be in that liminal state between jobs.

The Fugitive and class politics

I rewatched The Fugitive last night after listening to its Unclear and Present Danger installment. They had some interesting insights into its class and racial politics, its ’90s liberal fascination with competence porn, and its sheer story-telling efficiency.

They noticed something about it that I remembered noticing when I rewatched Rocky, which was the gradual disappearance of working class life from movies.

Richard Kimball has to briefly set aside his middle class identity, and we get a little glimpse of his life masquerading as a janitor. Harrison Ford has a way of acting like someone pretending to be someone harmless that is sort of endearing and also took on some extra weight in The Fugitive. We know he’s a high-level vascular surgeon, so when he’s dressed in a janitor uniform and a doctor sort of bosses him around and he gets that “Harrison Ford playing someone who is acting deferential even though they’re really this high-level, super-competent person,” it sort of lands.

Now, the hosts of Unclear and Present Danger want to call this out as “liberal class consciousness,” and I’m not sure quite what I make of that. As a time capsule? Sure, I’d argue liberals in the ’90s were more class conscious, because the Democratic Party was still struggling with its working class identity. But I also think “its working class identity” lost that struggle. Happy to discuss, but:

• Fear of Falling, Barbara Ehrenreich, 1989
• Listen, Liberal!, Thomas Frank, 2016
• The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Gary Gerstle, 2022
• “The Neoliberal Order Is Crumbling. It’s Up to Us What Comes Next,” Interview with Gary Gerstle, Jacobin, 2022.
• “When Will Neoliberalism Collapse? w/Gary Gerstle,” Jen Pan, Jacobin on YouTube, 2022

“Vote blue no matter who” isn’t the slogan of a working class party.

Sweeps vibe shift

We live next to a park, so I suspect we have a heightened awareness of whatever is going on with the city and its woeful response to homelessness. Combined with Al actually working in that subject area and frequently offering in our conversations, “oh yeah, the new county chair has this initiative, so the Joint Office is in panic mode trying to make it happen,” we’ve got higher-than-average awareness of the surrounding policy.

In the 14 years we’ve lived in Lents, homeless camping has gone from something that happened at the periphery of the neighborhood here and there to very large encampments on the Springwater that provoked fact-finding missions from state politicians, to just coming to accept that the block we live on will always be host to at least a busted up RV, trailer, or van; or maybe three; or maybe six or seven.

Something we’ve gotten used to is that nothing ever really happens. Now and then PBOT comes through and slaps green stickers on cars. It doesn’t seem targeted, to the extent they’ll put them on vehicles that have been there for literal months, and they’ll do it to a car that parked on the street this morning. I don’t know much about city policy, so my guess, having once had an old Volvo I didn’t drive much get stickered, is that it’s more of a question than an assertion.

The most police activity we ever saw was when an RV caught on fire, killing the occupant. The police came around the next day and watched while people broke into the dead man’s car carted his things away, then hotwired the car and drove it off.

“Well he’s dead, so technically nobody owns it,” said one, with his thumbs hooked in his tactical vest.

“Well, one of his friends went to tell his daughter, so I think she’d disagree.”

“Huh.”

Just, “huh,” then turning back to watch the vultures.

But something seems to have changed.

When the city swept the squatters and RV encampment down the trail not too long ago, it displaced a few RV owners who found their way onto our block and sort of kicked off the spring homeless camping season. We did our usual thing: Took over some food and water, said “hi,” and tried to learn what we could about them and their lives. We observe a “good neighbors” mentality about the whole thing, meaning it would take more than has ever happened to get us to call anyone in. A lot of our neighbors are less charitable about the whole thing. We got invited to one neighborhood meeting to discuss a more active period a few summers ago, and never got invited again after we said we weren’t interested in low-grade harassment tactics.

Anyhow, this crew arrived, we made an attempt to make contact, we observed that these folks were less interested in contact, and we settled in for another period of having people encamped on the street. It has always, during times of heightened activity, meant fights at three in the morning, picking trash out of the yard, finding food wrappers and cans next to the outdoor outlets, getting the occasional report from one of the campers that someone else prowled our car or windows, and sometimes three or four old gas generators running 24/7 until we walk over and ask for a break from the noise.

The change this time is that PBOT showed up, did its sticker run, and someone posted the area for encampments. Park rangers showed up and explained that it wasn’t okay to put bags of trash along the street in the park and warned that the unleashed Pit Bull needed to be restrained. A cleanup crew showed up and put everything unattended in a rented truck and drove off. Police have been doing slow-drives down the block eyeballing the folks who stuck around after the initial hazing. A trailer that got towed into place and left got a sticker this morning after a mere 48 hours. The average up to now was closer to months.

It’s a change. I’ve never seen any part of our corner of Lents get this kind of concentrated attention. I wonder what has changed.