How much did you get done today?

Some days might be busy, but at the end of the day you can't even remember if you got anything done. If you keep your Org mode files in a git repository, there's a way to get continuous feedback on whether or not you're getting stuff done.

Let's create a productivity-of-the-day function returning the total number of TODO statements that have either been added or removed from all agenda files. This is a pretty good proxy for productivity - or at least to see that there's a bit of progress throughout the day.

The code does the following:

1. For any org-agenda-file, go to its base directory.

2. Count the added or removed TODO statements for today using good old command-line tooling like:

   git log --since=yesterday -p ~/Dropbox/org/things.org \
    | grep TODO \
    | grep -E "^\+|^\-" \
    | wc -l
   

3. For all org-agenda-files, aggregate this number and print the result.

Here's the code:

(defun count-lines-with-expression (s exp)
  "Count the number of lines in the string S that contain the regular expression EXP."
  (let ((count 0))
    (mapc (lambda (line)
	    (when (string-match-p exp line)
	      (setq count (+ 1 count))))
	  (split-string s "\n"))
    count))

(defun productivity-of-the-day ()
  (seq-reduce
   (lambda (acc it)
     (let* ((folder (file-name-directory it))
	    (file (file-name-nondirectory it))
	    (base-cmd (concat "cd "
			      folder
			      "; git log --since=midnight -p "
			      file
			      "| grep TODO"))
	    (changed (shell-command-to-string base-cmd))
	    (added (count-lines-with-expression changed "^\\+"))
	    (removed (count-lines-with-expression changed "^\\-")))
       (cons (+ (car acc) added)
	     (- (cdr acc) removed))))
   org-agenda-files
   '(0 . 0)))

You can then show this number in a convenient place - for example, in the Emacs modeline. Personally, I show it in the status bar (polybar) of my window manager (i3). Here's what it looks like:

This is done by calling emacsclient in a custom module:

[module/productivity]
type = custom/script
exec = echo 💪 `emacsclient -a "" --eval "(productivity-of-the-day)"`

If you're new to calling Emacs functions from the command-line or other scripts, we've got you covered. Here's a blog post outlining this in detail.

Happy hacking!

P.S.: Don't conflate quantity with quality.

If you liked this post, please consider supporting our Free and Open Source software work – you can sponsor us on Github and Patreon or star our FLOSS repositories.