Calendar.org

My Journey with Org Roam Journals

It’s a while now that I’m trying to use Org Roam’s journal to track my plans. For each day, I’ll have a separate dated file, which I can open with a quick key combination, and if I need some info from other days, I’ll use my project management tooling like consult-ag to find what I need.

This is of course not only for planning. I was using this setup, to also take notes, related to each piece of work, so I could also reflect on them relatively. But it was starting to feel cluttered, and more complex than I need it to be.

Discovering Calendar.txt

Then I came across calendar.txt. The idea is super simple and brilliant. Every day is a row in a text file, and using some code to indicate different type of activities. It’s mainly optimized to be usable via terminal and so to say, grep-able.

It’s fun, but I’m not very good at remembering acronyms and names, and prefer a more descriptive way. So, I thought how hard it could be to recreate this in Org.

Calendar.org Implementation

So, basically, I need:

* [2025-03-10 Mon]

And then I need to repeat this pattern for some times, let’s say a year, so:

M-x org-clone-subtree-with-time-shift (C-c C-x c)

It’ll ask for a number of clones (I used 365), and a cycle, which I used (+1d), and as easy as that, the template is ready. Yeah, I was blown away when I learned about it. This is how it would look like:

* [2025-03-10 Mon]
** Morning routine
  - [X] Meditation
  - [X] Exercise
  - [ ] Review day's priorities

** Work
  - [X] Team standup meeting
  - [ ] Complete project proposal
  CLOCK: [2025-03-10 Mon 09:30]--[2025-03-10 Mon 11:45] =>  2:15

** Evening
  - [ ] Read chapter of current book

So, how would the usability look like. This is of course not following single line approach, and I can go haywire with it. Screenshot, table, and everything else that I can embed in my org file, I can have here. But I can’t grep it without some solid grep kong-fu.

But do I really need it? There are many tools, to optimize the UX, and the plus side is, when I filter what I’m looking for, I can in-place update it as well. One interesting functionality which I haven’t used much before, is narrowing. I go to the sub-tree I’m working on, clock-in (yeah, fancy time tracking), and then C-x n s to hide everything else, so I only see what I want.