The Text Editor with Superpowers — Org-mode beats Markdown any day.

Recently, I learned from Carl Pullien that the best way to manage projects is in your notes app. After my failures with project management softwares, I agree with Carl that this seems to be the best possible way out. I work on solo projects. For me, speed is essential. Adding tasks and planning becomes redundant faster than you can get them done. This creates system bloat.

Notes applications are the fastest way to capture your thoughts. I hope you all agree on this with me.

But I used Markdown for notes. Don’t get me wrong, markdown is wonderful for writing and publishing, but it is inefficient when getting your markdown notes app to behave like a task manager.

While grappling with this problem, I encountered a writer-programmer who wrote about how he saved his fiction project written in markdown from going to the trash bin. His insight was to shift to org-mode in Emacs.

In org-mode, he could add tags to his headings. The tags were plots and subplots. He could now keep track of his subplots and plots across the novel. He could collapse the heading and sub-heading with the outline mode and move sections, scenes, and chapters to flow with the plot line. Read his blog post here.

The Project Task Manager

It took me a weekend to learn org-mode in emacs. I recommend you download the graphic interface as it is much easier to use, and you can embed images into it, unlike the terminal interface. I believe the terminal one is faster if you are the keyboard ninja. My org-mode skills are not so good yet, so I am sticking to the graphical UI.

Customise your Task Manager

The beauty of org-mode is you can add TODO, NEXT, DONE, etc., with keyboard shortcuts. Of course, you will need to configure your workflow.

Note — I highly recommend Bing to learn org-mode over ChatGPT as bing gave me much more accurate results.

Schedule and Tag your TODOs

You can add tags and add schedule dates to your task. There is an agenda view that quickly helps you filter down your tasks in weekly view or as per your tags.

Plenty of export option

You can export your docs in markdown, PDF, HTML, and other options with a few keyboard shortcuts.

Get Blown Away

I’m amazed by the power of org-mode! 🤩 After just three days of using it, I can already feel the magic it brings. It’s hard to explain, but something special is happening. 🤩