I have an on-again, off-again relationship with productivity systems. I usually don't bother with them but on those infrequent occasions when my life gets a bit hectic, I will sometimes make use of one. When that happens I always fall back to David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD). I read his book a long time ago and, at the time, found myself impressed.

The fundamental feature of the system is that it downplays the classic, detailed, prioritized to-do list in favour of the so-called next action list. When considering a particular goal, instead of allowing yourself to become overwhelmed with all the myriad things you know you need to do in service of that goal, you instead focus only on the very next thing you can do to move closer to your goal. The end result is an unsorted list of things you can do "in the moment", across all the various goals in your life at the moment.

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Pelican is my blogging engine of choice these days. Given that Emacs is usually (though not always) my text editor of choice, it made sense to try and streamline the process of writing blog entries for Pelican with Emacs. What follows is my attempt to document such an endeavour, partly because I think it might be useful to the (undoubtedly tiny) cross section of people who use both Emacs and Pelican, but mostly so that I have something to refer back to when the need arises.

Note that this blog entry does not cover things like actually setting up your Pelican blog. It also doesn't cover my reasons for using Pelican in the first place; for that, feel free to peruse my other blog entry on the subject.

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I use Emacs as a python IDE. The web already offers a significant number of resources on the subject but I've made a couple of specialized tweaks that I feel may be worth sharing. So here we go.

Why am I doing this? Well, the simple answer is that I like using Emacs. I do most of my writing in it. I use it as my task manager and TODO list. I have, in the past, used it as my email client. So it makes sense that I would use it as my python development environment. Your mileage may vary.

I am mainly a Java developer and Eclipse user at work. Eclipse makes Java programming somewhat tolerable. I use the following features heavily:

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I'm a long time (15 years) Emacs user. Please don't draw too many conclusions from this fact. I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, an Emacs "wizard". I don't know how to make my Emacs buffer do amazing things with a single key stroke. I'm embarrassed to say, for example, that I've only recently learned the keystroke for deleting an entire line.

I'm not a Lisp hacker, and even less of an Emacs Lisp hacker. While I wouldn't say my knowledge of Lisp is non-existent, I would still firmly categorize it as "novice-level".

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