Omnifocus style reviews with org-mode

I started using Emacs and org-mode in earnest in the middle of 2019. At that point in time I was using Omnifocus to track my tasks and Bearapp for notes. I was missing plaintext functionality. Since then I’ve reproduced most of the functionality that Omnifocus offerred except one particular feature: reviews.

In GTD, reviews occupy a pretty important niche. Without regular task and project reviews task lists tend to grow out of control and become polutted. One important consideration for a task list is for it to closely resemble the actual state of what you have to do.

I went looking for a way to do automated reviews in org, and found org-review.

org-review relies on the LAST_REVIEW property to determine when the next review (NEXT_REVIEW) should happen and out of the box this property is not generated.

I wrote a bit of elisp to auto generate these properties for all TODO entries when a file is saved. This guarantees that the entry will bubble up for review a month after creation. Month is a default review duration that can be configured via REVIEW_DELAY property.

Add this somewhere in ~/.emacs or similar.

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(defun my/org-add-next-review-property ()
  "Add NEXT_REVIEW property to headlines that don't have one"
  (interactive)
  (org-map-entries '(unless (org-entry-get nil "NEXT_REVIEW") (org-review-insert-last-review)) "TODO=\"TODO\"")
)


(add-hook 'org-mode-hook
  (lambda ()
  (add-hook 'before-save-hook 'my/org-add-next-review-property 'local)))

The process will look something like this:

1. Add a TODO task to inbox
2. Once a file is saved the *_REVIEW properties are generated.
3. … some time passess …
4. Hit C-c a R to start the review mode.
5. Hit C-c C-r to review selected items.