Newbie. Why do people add individual files to org-agenda-files? Why not just add your directory with all your org files and be done with it?

Or in other words, why wouldn't you want all org files to be searched for agenda items?

I don’t know about others, but I also put some non-agenda files in org-directory. Some of these files are some notes files and some random thoughts, etc.

That might work. In my case, the agenda became so cumbersome it really didn't help me stay organized.

What would it hurt to have them included in org-agenda-files? If nothing is scheduled in them, then none of that would go into the agenda, right?

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So you had so many things in your agenda that it became cumbersome? How did you deal with that?

Agenda startup gets very slow with lots of files.

I want to have TODO items that are not scheduled. The todo status can be some descriptive text that serves as a short classification of some kind. And these TODO items would have been collected by the TODO agenda if they were scanned as agenda files.

Interesting, thanks!

Makes sense, thanks!

As others said, a folder can have many files, with some org mode files among them. Another scenario is having org files "sprinkled" around the system. Some are work related, some are personal, hobbies. You want org to scan them for tasks but you can't put them all in a single folder because git/dropbox/gdrive whatever. Of course, you can also generate this list of org files programmatically in elisp, for example I do it based on the system name - so every computer I use has a different org-agenda-files variable.

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See also `org-ql`, which implements some agenda-like views that are much faster to generate. Nevertheless, the first time an Org file is opened in an Emacs buffer, Org does some setup work that can take a little time, depending on configuration.

I work on several projects at a time. The agenda points me to active projects. Individual project files have their own detailed agendas that I create with alphapapa's org-ql package. The org-ql ecosystem has some sidebar functions that I pop up while working on a project, so I can easily jump from one task to the next.

Oh great info, thanks!

Thanks /u/github-alphapapa! I was just looking at your package online docs yesterday, and I'm def going to try it out sometime. I'm still basically brand fresh new at all of this.