[O] would take more than an org-mode strip-down.

[James Levine]

Greetings,

As an expert end-user but outside the computer science field, I’ve felt there 
to be a high cost of entry for working in org-mode. I like the idea very much, 
as I am trying to strip down to an Autofocus system  and take a more intuitive, 
frictionless approach. Because I’m not following the play-by-play on the gnu 
boards, I thought I’d zoom out and tell you what a consumer experience is like:

1) It’s not that there isn’t enough documentation, it’s that there’s too much 
of it.
        Imagine that setting up a wordpress database is probably too much for 
the average person. You go to wordpress.org (and at this point you’d already 
need to read the fine print or you’d probably point to wordpress.com) and the 
button simply tells you to download “here”. Now what?

        In other words, if you want to expand popularity among end-users, not 
coders, there needs to be a middle ground: the visual step-by-step needs to be 
uncluttered by additional description.  Org-mode is further obscured by the 
fact that other services, a text editor and such need to be pointed to as well 
in the “getting started process." I need to know why I’m being forwarded to an 
external web page or why I need to read on between each download link, or how 
to keep track of each link if each one is taking me to a separate page. You 
wouldn’t want someone telling you the history of every landmark that you passed 
if they were giving you driving instructions, would you? The verbose approach 
doesn’t actually help retention, it floods it. The gnu support community, like 
this email, is very heavily text-based.

2) Some things are just better with a gui.
        I’m referring specifically to the more popularized use of tags or 
“keywords.” Most all the file management clients fail at this somewhere. You 
are requiring people to be literate, as in secondary school spelling-NOT 
culture, not just in a single instance of clarity, but in a manner that can be 
consistently repeated, while you’re catering to an audience that probably has a 
higher than average proportion of dyslexics, autistics, and college drop-outs 
in its midst. 

Furthermore, tagging conventions are easy to break, and most End-Users won’t 
know to instill them to begin with. “Have I been using the plural of my common 
and collective nouns? What about that time I hashtagged a task to myself in my 
email and I put the tag in the Subject heading? Did I spell it the same way my 
tags were set up back on my desktop?” It’s too easy to orphan tags, spell them 
wrong, flip a p with a q. Without a pull up, cash-register-like cheat sheet 
that lets you touch the tags that you already made, one will leave a trail of 
junk mark-up. Not to mention, free tagging does not endorse a constrained 
vocabulary as it would, say, if you were trying to figure out what kind of 
lettuce someone was buying and you worked the register. I’m also inclined to 
believe that crossing something out with my finger, or putting a check in a 
checkbox is more intuitive and less prone to error than managing "[x]”s in a 
document.

3) the 2nd problem ties in with this. Without a constrained tagging vocabulary 
and other conventions, an org-mode task system is not that easy to subscribe to 
when trying to encourage a team to get on board. The list is not inherently 
intuitive to all end-users. What is logic to one person is not logic to the 
next. (This may come as a surprise to many coders).

4) The master org-mode file will get lost in the shuffle. My litmus test for a 
good file management system is “if I’m sick or thankfully on a beach that day, 
can everyone else to whom my work pertains, understand for themselves how to 
incorporate what they need from me?” Are my naming conventions clear? Are my 
directory structures clear? Can people find them on their own, or are they 
going to call me while I’m trying to enjoy the beach? Can I effectively be a 
“ghost in the machine” for my institution? Or have I made people dependent upon 
me  for the petty fact that my workflows are not understood by anyone else? 

        Again, feeding off point 3, org-mode does little to instill good file 
management habits. I do appreciate that the plain text approach builds off 
simplicity rather than the adhered complexity of a database. Nonetheless, if I 
open up “Things”, for example (I don’t use it myself), as an app to keep my 
tasks, I know there’s a central repository for these stray little database 
entry “tasks”. If I’m out of the office, I can tell whoever is working on my 
assignments to open up “Things,” or I can share this with them. Because 
org-mode doesn’t reinforce where files are saved to or how many files are 
accessed for my various projects, there’s plenty of wiggle room for bad file 
management habits to come into play. Instead of telling my colleague to open 
“Things”, I need to tell them, "look in my documents folder, open this file 
with this app. When you’re done with this by 1p, I saved the task list for the 
catering event this evening in my dropbox. Look under documents, Jim’s stuff." 
You see where this is going. 

An org-mode text document is just too flimsy to stand alone in the sea of files 
on a computer. That’s why evernote is successful-it’s a more orderly place for 
scraps. People used to muck up folders and drag stuff to their desktop with the 
same caliber of content. If you held your desktop as sacred, or your Emacs 
platform, what then happens when these other “temporary” odds and ends 
nonetheless compete with your focus? 

5) I don’t subscribe to the notion that all ideas begin to take form through an 
Outline. Outlines were something pounded into lots of heads as kids, and they 
work for some and not for others. To me, they are far too linear of an 
invention to trust with germinating ideas and projects. My outline skills are 
epically good, but I still don’t find the outline as the key tool for 
repurposing and leveraging divergent ideas (or for note-taking for that 
matter). And again, with an awareness management system like org-mode, how 
would you effectively create an Outline for Everything? Would that be any 
easier to navigate than the index card that I made just for today in my back 
pocket? Then to play the provocateur, if I can’t create an  Outline for 
Everything how many little baskets of Anythings do I want to enforce in my 
life? Or should I just start with my work? (then what happens to the rest of my 
life? Should I use refrigerator magnets?) Where do I put these separate 
Outlines if I can’t look in the same place at any time for them? How do they 
fit in with each other? The mobile implementation of org-mode thus far further 
confuses the matter-it places these divergent files in a file browser. How does 
that actually help me work the system? What about a front end?

        Perhaps some instruction on bridging the free-association, brain 
storming, linear thinking, mind-mapping, UML, media files and inspiration, 
concepts directly into an Org-mode file would be of help. If I understood 
org-mode, I might even be the person to do it. Many ideas will never see a 
formal outline first (even if the concept of an outline latently exists)-only 
my software design documents or other specification sheets would show through 
with such formality.

Please tell me if and where these points will be addressed, as their a slim 
chance of my renavigating to the live thread where I found your email (see 
point 1). Hope this message is in the right hands. I’m incredibly grateful for 
this line of communication and for the work you are doing, and I want to make 
this work.

James Levine-East Village, NYC