life is 90% of my use-cases for org-mode

never had neuro-divergent testing. don't care, i'm doing alright with my [org-mode exoself](https://stormrider.io/org-exoself.html). it's designed to splint my mental weirdness into something useful. (you can [learn more about me](https://stormrider.io/credo.html), if you dare.) my question to the group: does anyone else depend on emacs and org-mode to complement your weaknesses? has anyone else given deep thought to what they don't (or can't) do well, and figured out ways to use emacs as a normalizer?

Without going into too much details, I'll tell you this: my Org Mode setup is only slightly less granular than yours. It's those daily repetitive tasks for those trivial things that let me do regularly what most people would consider basic habits. It's what enables me to keep my life and my household in order. It's really the only thing that sticks. And it's what allowed me to consistently improve, take on more and more challenges. At the same time, whenever I get overwhelmed, fail to keep the agenda under control, and eventually spend a day to clean it up - in that time period, all my habits evaporate. I became a mess for a day, or a week. But it's strictly better than what I was before I've developed my system (which was a decade after I first learned Emacs and Org Mode!): before, I was always a mess. So yes, I'm very much dependent on Emacs :). That said, I won't be arguing that Emacs / Org Mode is a silver bullet. It's just something that works *for me*. I enjoy using it. I enjoy writing Lisp, including Emacs Lisp. I enjoy the malleability, the ability to constantly tweak and improve my organizational system to better match my circumstances, and my personality. As I learn more about how my brain works, I shape my environment to work with it. It took a lot of work to get to that point - but it wasn't as much about Emacs, as it was about self-discovery. For example, after a decade of using Org Mode's agenda on and off, only in the last year I feel I can truly rely on it. That's because I figured out the *right* amount of information to show - enough to be useful, but not so much that I instantly get overwhelmed and anxious. Same with capture templates: I use mostly the same ones I used for years before, but now they *mean something to me*, instead of being just bits of copy-pasted config. And I keep refining it, of course. I still don't like some of the arrangements. A lot of it is because Org Mode is an outliner - its natural data structure is a *tree*, whereas work naturally structures itself into *directed graphs*. There's a fundamental mismatch here, which I try to paper over with workflow and bits of code. The file dedicated into improvements of my system is itself some 100 TODO headlines strong :).

Wow, one of the best posts about the benefits of truly grokking Emacs, and the time it takes to do so. Too often on here it's 'how do I do X quickly and easily' which IMHO rather misses the point. > It took a lot of work to get to that point - but it wasn't as much about Emacs, as it was about self-discovery. For example, after a decade of using Org Mode's agenda on and off, only in the last year I feel I can truly rely on it. That's because I figured out the right amount of information to show - enough to be useful, but not so much that I instantly get overwhelmed and anxious. This was my exact same experience. > I still don't like some of the arrangements. A lot of it is because Org Mode is an outliner - its natural data structure is a tree, whereas work naturally structures itself into directed graphs. There's a fundamental mismatch here, which I try to paper over with workflow and bits of code. Are you me? I am working on (yet another) Zettelkasten sort of implementation (I know, just what the world needs, lol). But for exactly those reasons. Some parts of it are quite good, and others rubbish though, so I haven't published it. Thanks to both you (and OP) for being so honest about something potentially so personal and private.

ofcourse. Org mode is what I use to overcome my horrible memory (ofcourse I had to train myself too). Putting org mode aside for a moment, I developed have 3 main habits over the years that I learned from Richard Feynman. 1) I write the things that I don't know to find the answer to them later or research about them 2) When I read books or try to learn new stuff, I write notes and in the notes I leave out some keywords as hints for myself and then come back later and try to write about what I learned using those keywords 3) For big things that I want to learn I follow the Feynman method [https://www.csinow.edu/career-tips/the-feynman-technique-the-best-learning-method-youve-never-heard-of-before/](https://www.csinow.edu/career-tips/the-feynman-technique-the-best-learning-method-youve-never-heard-of-before/) For years I tried to do them just by tradition means. I used to carry a notebook everywhere. It was annoying and not efficient. Then I moved to custom made software to make it more efficient. Didn't work. Tried mind mapping tools. no good. At the end I tried to put the time and do a proper research about org-mode and the ways I might be able to utilize it and honestly It's the best. Cross referencing information, TODOs, notes, etc is amazing. The fact that I can write simple queries to figure out what I've learned in the past about a topic or query a topic sometime leads to some ideas that I've put it years ago. Org mode literally is the markup that I can map my mind with it. ​ But Emacs itself is what really helped me overcome my weaknesses specially about my bad short term memory, I use Emacs as a window manager (like any sane person will do) and that gives a one important opportunity to integrate everything in the one tool that I use the most and spend my majority of time in it. It might look simple but it's really important to me. I integrated so many things that I need in my env that I can not survive without it. E.g the way my notifications work or my jobs that collect some data from the internet periodically and append them to some org files and many other things. ​ To summarize, it's hard to imagine what my life would've looked like with out Emacs :))

FWIW, org-mode + Marie Kondo were foundational in helping me get my personal life back on track. Every weekend I have an org-mode checklist yasnippet that helps me plan and do what *must* be done by Sunday night. If it wasn't for org-mode, I'd easily be living an episode of Hoarders, which was the direction I was going in before combining Konmari and org-mode.