Personal task management under stress (with Org mode)

Ihor Radchenko - IRC: yantar92

The following image shows where the talk is in the schedule for Sat 2026-12-12. Solid lines show talks with Q&A via BigBlueButton. Dashed lines show talks with Q&A via IRC or Etherpad.

Format: 20-min talk ; Q&A: BigBlueButton conference room https://media.emacsconf.org/2026/current/bbb-tasks.html Etherpad: https://pad.emacsconf.org/2026-tasks
Etherpad: https://pad.emacsconf.org/2026-tasks
Discuss on IRC: #emacsconf
Status: Waiting for video from speaker

Description

Ever had tasks piling up at work, then family matters on top, all with critical deadlines you cannot miss? Such moments are often the entry point to exploring GTD, P.A.R.A., pomodoro, time blocking, time budgeting, and whatnot. However, fancy personal task management techniques often sound logical and appealing, but quickly fall apart in real life. Worse, they make your life more difficult because they encourage recording even more tasks that will never be completed and only pile up, diluting what really matters. The truth is – you cannot complete every possible task and explore every possible idea in your life. Not even in the short term, because emergencies do happen. To be useful, personal task management should handle failures, emergencies, and a plain lack of time and energy. In this talk, I will introduce the key principles that took me years of task management to discover; and that I wish I had known from the beginning. I will also show the detailed workflows I built for myself, with Org mode, for Org mode maintenance and for my real life job. This is not a package, but ideas, and workflows that can be personalized as much as anything in Emacs.

Questions or comments? Please e-mail emacsconf-org-private@gnu.org