After a dry spell I'm finally booked for enough work to need #OrgMode and #OrgAgenda again to keep track, and when I opened Agenda again for the first time since mid-2025 things were obviously A Mess. 💫 Some to-do items had been rescheduled almost 200 times, untracked habits lay forgotten and dying. It took < 5 minutes to clear or triage though, and Agenda became usable again with the peace of mind that work tasks won't slip through the cracks.

Honestly the Org Mode/Agenda system fills the niche of a Bullet Journal (which I also tried for a few years) for me in being easy to come back to after I inevitably drop off from time to time. And that's a good thing, not only because I get to have an organization system even after being away for a while, but because there are stretches of life when a system genuinely isn't necessary and may do more harm than good. It's nice to be able to move fluidly between the states. #Emacs #ADHD

Org Mode Tags +Agenda: My Real Meeting Workflow

In my productivity system post I talked about a custom view I use to track tasks than need to be talked about in my weekly meetings. I use two different tags to accomplish this:

• active
• meeting

Today we’ll take a look at how this works by first showing the whole chunk of code, then working through it so we understand what’s happening. The code below would go in your config.el file.

Doom after!

Doom provides a set of helper macros intended to manage load order and configuration in its lazy-loaded environment. after! is one that says don’t run the commands inside the brackets until after the org package has been fully set up. This avoids load-order issues where org-agenda-custom-commands could be reset later when Org or Doom finishes initializing.

The best write up Doom macros I’ve been able to find is in Discourse which includes best practices of one of the Doom maintainers.

Configure org-agenda-custom-commands

Org Mode expects that we’re going to customize our agenda commands so provides org-agenda-custom-commands as a variable that can be customized. setq assigns a value to the org-agenda-custom-commands variable, replacing its existing value.

Because we used after! we don’t have to worry that our variable will be overwritten later by Doom or Org Mode, though if you defined the variable again later it would overwrite earlier definitions. If you want additional custom views, you must extend this list rather than redefining org-agenda-custom-commands again, or earlier entries will be lost.

Defining the Agenda Commands

Next we set a prefix key of x which houses all our custom views away from the rest of the built in views in Org Mode’s Agenda view. You can see this visually when we open an Agenda view and see the x at the bottom. Once we press that we’ll see our custom tags.

Once you’ve pressed x to reveal the subcommands you can press a to see a list of all headings, notes, DONE or TODO headings, tagged with our tags of meeting or active. t will show you only TODO headings that have the same tags.

• [ ] x-custom-views.png

These lines created a tag based search in Agenda view. You could do this every time manually, but if you’re using a search more than once a week then you should automate it.

Note that the notation for searching tags +active is different than the syntax used to tag an item :active:. Using +active is using Org’s search syntax instead of Lisp’s syntax. The | character should be familiar to programmers and means OR. So we’re searching for items tagged active OR items tagged meeting.

Lisp is the programming language of Emacs.

Why use this?

While you could move items to a specific file for meetings, using a custom Agenda view allows you to search across files. 99% of my meeting content is from my single proudcity.org file for work, but by setting it up this way I can ensure that if my file organization changes in the future my workflow is not affected.

Org Mode Tags +Agenda: My Real Meeting Workflow
In my productivity system post I talked about a custom view I use to track tasks than need to be talked about in my weekly meetings. I use two different tags to accomplish this:

active

meeting

Today we'll take a look at how this works by first showing the whole chunk of code, then working through it so we und
https://curtismchale.ca/2026/01/15/org-mode-tags-agenda-my-real-meeting-workflow/
#Productivity #emacs #OrgAgenda #OrgMode

I'm setting up a agenda file seasons.org where I will add the seasons for fruits, vegetables and other yearly reoccuring periods. An example would be Strawberry Season from 1. of June to 31. of August every year.

Does anyone know a good trick on how to set that up with diary or with org org-mode timestamps?

#emacs #orgmode #orgagenda

I brushed over my #emacs #orgmode and #orgagenda skills, and I feel ready to use org-agenda as my and only agenda.

There's one feature I need and am not totally sure about: how to access it on the go, on my phone for instance. I could export to ics and upload to an online calendar, or export to html and use that on my phone.

Any other suggestions or experience to share?

ping @yantar92 @sje @daviwil

TAONAW - #Emacs and #OrgMode: Filtering org-agenda to *exclude* a category
https://taonaw.com/2024/12/02/back-in-july.html

I do this daily to switch between personal and business view of the same #orgagenda. 😉

How do you split your work and personal tasks on #orgmode #orgagenda ? I used to have them split by tags and filter by them, but I wonder if there are other and better options

#emacs
Send Halp!