Re: [Orgmode] Organizing a students live

[Jan Böcker]

I study computer science in the first semester. I have one org file
dedicated to university (~/org/studium.org).

In this org file, there will be one top-level heading for each semester
(currently there is only one -
"Wintersemster 09/10 [2009-10-01 Do]--[2010-03-31 Mi]"). You see that I
added the beginning and end of the semester as inactive timestamps.

Under the heading for the semester, I have one subtree for general
information such as vacation periods (denoted as a timespan:
"<2009-12-21 Mo>--<2010-01-03 Sa>"), examens and links to the websites
of my classes (to download the homework for the week).

Following that, I have a subtree for each calendar week, which looks
like this:

** Week 48 from [2009-11-23 Mo] to [2009-11-29 So]
**** Class 1
     General information about this week's curriculum sometimes goes
     here.
****** Class 1 Lecture <2009-11-23 Mo 16:00>
       [Link to the slides used in this lecture]        
        
       Class notes for the first lecture of the week go here.
       When I did not type it directly in org-mode (with the view
       narrowed to this subtree), there will be a link to the
       hand-written notes (I use Xournal on a Tablet PC), to some
       scanned image of paper, or at least a reference to the script
       to tell me where in the curriculum we left off.
****** Class 1 Lecture <2009-11-25 Mi 16:00>
       Class notes for the second one go here.
****** TODO Class 1 Homework [Link to Homework PDF]
       [Link to my solution of the exercises (Xournal)]
       When this homework has been graded the following week,
       (a link to) the notes I took on exercises I had made mistakes in
       will go here.
**** Class 2
     (repeat the same structure for the other classes)

At the end of this org file, there is a subtree named "Future", where
the entries for the next weeks are ready to be moved to the end of the
main tree. You can generate this fairly quickly if you create one
"template" subtree and then use M-x org-clone-subtree-with-time-shift
repeatedly to create a copy with all timestamps shifted one week forward.


This system works very well for me so far. I have a folder structure
similar to the subtree structure on disk
(~/uni/semester/calendar-week/class[/homework]) where I store all the
files I link to. This way, I can be sure that if I take ~/org/ and
~/uni/ with me, I have all of my most important data. I do not use
repeating timestamps because having a separate subtree for each
occurence of a lecture enables me to jump to the appropriate notes, etc.
right from my agenda view.

I have also tagged the nodes below each week by class and by type
(Lecture, Exercise), so I could do queries like "show me all Lecture
notes for Class 1", but so far I have not needed that. However, it does
not hurt to have it in the template, I might use it later.

Of course, the Homework entry gets assigned a DEADLINE when I download
the exercise .pdf and add the link.


I hope the above text is comprehensible enough; if there are any
questions, feel free to ask! I would also be interested in how other
students use Org. If it were not for org-mode, my class notes would be
in a messy pile of paper instead of a few keystrokes away...

Greetings from Germany,
        Jan