One of the requirements of my job is to send out a daily message. This message should summarize what I did the day before, and what I hope to accomplish for the current day. At first, I would spend my day jumping from task to task, and then the next morning, I would rack my brain to make sure I included all the things I worked on.
It didn’t take long to realize that this was no way to live. I definitely needed a better solution. So I started looking around.
Org Journal
After hunting around for a bit, I came across Org Journal. It is a fantastic package for, as the name implies, writing journal entries. And since it’s built on top of Org Mode, I knew I had to give it a try.
Once installed and configured, I can press, in my case, C-x j, and this will either start a new journal entry if one doesn’t already exist, or open an existing one. Each time a new entry is added, org-journal inserts a second level heading in the document, and stamps it with the time the entry was added.
This was definitely a productivity win for me, and so I settled on it as my tool of choice.
Scratching An Itch
Even though org-journal was assisting me in remembering everything I did on the previous day, I still had to format the entries into a suitable format and send them off to my boss. Accomplishing this was a multi-step process which I quickly grew tired of. I had to:
- Call M-x calendar and navigate to the previous day
- Press j to open that day’s journal entry
- C-x h to copy the entire entry
- C-x b scratch to switch over to my scratch buffer
- C-y to paste the journal contents in
- Remove any additional notes I had, strip out the top level headers and time stamps, and then add my plan for the current day.
What a bunch of nonsense! I certainly wasn’t going to do that 5 days a week for the rest of my career.
Elisp to the Rescue
So naturally, I did what any Emacs user would do: I wrote some lisp. Before we get into the code, I should warn you about something. I’m still pretty new to lisp. If you’re an old hat at this stuff, I’m sure there are better ways to accomplish what I’m doing. And I would LOVE to hear about them. Please feel free to comment!
Disclaimer aside, let’s get into the code.
What Was Yesterday
The first thing I needed to accomplish was determining the date of the prior day. Like most people (I hope), I only work 5 days a week. So simply grabbing yesterday’s date wasn’t going to work. Instead, I need to keep subtracting a day’s worth of time from the current day, until I reached some time period that fell between Monday and Friday.
That lead me to:
(defun my/org-find-previous-workday ()
(let* ((time (time-subtract (current-time) (seconds-to-time 86400)))
(workdays '("Monday" "Tuesday" "Wednesday" "Thursday" "Friday")))
(while (not (member (format-time-string "%A" time) workdays))
(setq time (time-subtract time (seconds-to-time 86400))))
time))Grab The Tasks
Once I knew the previous working day’s date, I needed to grab the journal entry’s content. Since I include notes and other references for each entry, and this email is supposed to be succinct, using the entire journal entry wasn’t sufficient. Instead, I needed to strip out just the second level headings, which include short summaries of what I’m working on.
I wrote three functions to handle this, which are included below. The results of these three functions is to return a list of all the headers in the org file with a level I specified. If I don’t specify a level, it will return all header levels.
(defun my/org-should-include-current (level)
(progn
(if (and
(outline-on-heading-p)
(or
(eq nil level) (eq level (org-outline-level))))
t
nil)))
(defun my/org-get-current-header ()
(progn
(setq beg (point))
(outline-end-of-heading)
(buffer-substring-no-properties beg (point))))
(defun my/org-outline-headings-to-list (level)
(setq headings '())
(show-all)
(goto-char (point-min))
(if (my/org-should-include-current level)
(add-to-list 'headings (my/org-get-current-header) t))
(while (outline-next-heading)
(if (my/org-should-include-current level)
(add-to-list 'headings (my/org-get-current-header) t)))
headings)Generating The Message
At this point, I had all the data I needed to quickly generate my scrum message. All that was left was to hook it together, open a temp buffer with the formatted results, and then start filling in the current day’s goals.
(defun my/org-outline-create-scrum-message ()
(interactive)
(let* ((previous (my/org-find-previous-workday)))
(setq journal-file (concat org-journal-dir (format-time-string "%Y%m%d" previous)))
(if (file-exists-p journal-file)
(progn
(switch-to-buffer (find-file-noselect journal-file))
(setq headings (my/org-outline-headings-to-list 2))
(switch-to-buffer "*daily scrum*")
(erase-buffer)
(insert "* Yesterday\n")
(mapcar (lambda(element)
(insert (replace-regexp-in-string "^** ..... " " - " element) "\n")) headings)
(insert "\n* Today\n - ")
(org-mode)
(show-all)))))Future Expansion
I have been using this method for the last couple of weeks to much success. It has saved me a ton of time, and has helped ensure that I account for every task I worked on during the previous day.
There are a few things I would like to improve. The most obvious next step is to hook up gnus to my work email and generate this message in an actual email buffer. Then, once I’m finished typing, I can just send it off directly from Emacs instead of copy and pasting it into my mail client.
The other thing I need to handle is skipped dates. If I take a vacation day, or there is a holiday, this code will just fail to generate a message template for me. It only goes back one day and then calls it quits after that. It wouldn’t take much to modify it to keep searching until it finds a day with an entry. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
As I mentioned before, I’m sure the code could be improved. I would love to hear feedback from the community on what I could do better. Lisp is still pretty new to me, but I’ve been having a blast learning it.
For those interested in seeing the code all in one place, or checking out the rest of my configuration, you can see it on GitHub.
Thanks, and happy coding!