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Beeswax: Free Productivity App in the Spirit of Lotus Agenda

Beeswax - Mind Your Own Beeswax

Wow, this looks like a really interesting project to watch — a GNU-licensed, command line productivity app that finds inspiration in a bona fide classic:

Beeswax is an information management system inspired by Lotus Agenda. It aims to recreate Agenda’s flexibility and efficiency in a clutter-free, text-based (ncursesw) user interface with vi key bindings. Beeswax views & reports will have specifications for sections, columns, filtering, and sorting…

The relationships between items of information are highly flexible. An item can be easily assigned to several different categories and the view immediately displays the new relationships. An item can just as easily be detached from categories. As you move items through Beeswax, their relationship to each other remains highly flexible.

You still hear a lot of people saying Agenda is the closest they ever got to their dream productivity app. And, depending on who you ask, Agenda's endless flexibility was either incredibly powerful or infinitely fiddly.

Beeswax is a very young application, but I’ll definitely be giving it a spin. There's certainly a long-standing itch for Agenda that lot of folks would love to have scratched.

The Question to You

Any of the old hardcore Agenda folks tried out Beeswax yet?

[via Anarchaia]

kwelndar's picture

org-mode Rules

I've been using org-mode for a while now, and I really love the way you can use tags for multiple contexts. It seems that multiple contexts is a big point of discussion among GTD app people, but for me it's great to be able to see something I can do in any place or mindset I happen to be in. If I need to get in touch with someone, it could be on their agenda, and the contexts phone and email at the same time (yes, I know most people prepend '@' for contexts, but in the book that was only a hack to get these things to list first in certain GTD-unaware apps like email clients).

The pretty much free-form way you can structure the files and link between them can fit just about any way you like to work. I put my small projects (2-7 steps or so) into one large file, keep the larger projects and my thoughts and ideas about them in their own files, and simple NEXT actions in their own files. I can link to all these from a master file for easy weekly reviewing.

If any emacs user out there doing GTD hasn't tried org-mode, I urge you to do so at your earliest convenience. If you have a recent version, you don't even have to install anything. Once you get used to it you might want to upgrade to the lastest version, though.

I found the agenda view a bit unwieldy if you just want a certain context list, however, especially if you want to print it out, so I wrote a little shell script that looks through all the .org files and spits out a little checklist of the context you want to see. It keeps me sane.

 
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