Let's finish off February with something I'm trying to make a part of my life: workflows. You can call them checklists, but I'm going to stick with the more generic term of workflow since I don't want to narrow how I think about their usage. The majority of tasks in my life are repetitive. What I want is a simple way of writing an Org-mode file, dropping it a specific directory, and being able to create an instance of that template that Org will operate on.

Let's start by creating the workflow template instantiation function, and binding it to my Org-mode keymap: 

(defvar org-workflow-dir
  (concat org-directory "/workflows")
  "Directory in which my workflows are stored.")

(defun mak::org-new-workflow (template)
  (interactive
   ;; Choose a workflow template.
   (list (read-file-name "Workflow: " (concat org-workflow-dir "/templates/"))))
  ;; Generate the template's file name.
  (let* ((datetime (format-time-string "%F::%T"))
         (filename (file-name-nondirectory template))
         (workflow (format "%s/active/%s::%s" org-workflow-dir datetime filename)))
    (copy-file template workflow)
    (find-file workflow)))

(define-key mak::org-mode-map (kbd "w") 'mak::org-new-workflow)

Now when I chord C-c o w, I will be able to choose a workflow template with Helm, and a new file matching the current date and time, suffixed with the template's file name, will be created, 'activated', and opened in a buffer. By activated, I mean that the template will exposed to Org-mode's Agenda. An example file name is 2017-02-28::01:06:33::month-end.org.

We need to make Agenda aware of where the Org-mode files I want it to use are kept. For now I will include all files in my ~/org directory, since there is no reason to do otherwise. I suspect that I will eventually reach a point where the number of files Org is processing will require me to archive some files, but I'm not there yet. And when I do reach that point, creating a way to archive a file to ~/org/workflows/archive should be easy. 

(setq org-agenda-files
      (list org-directory
            (concat org-workflow-dir "/active")))

Finally, I want to create two Agenda views: calendar and tasks. 

(defun mak::org-agenda-calendar (&optional arg)
  (interactive "P")
  (org-agenda arg "a"))

(defun mak::org-agenda-tasks (&optional arg)
  (interactive "P")
  (org-agenda arg "t"))

(define-key mak::org-mode-map (kbd "a") 'mak::org-agenda-calendar)
(define-key mak::org-mode-map (kbd "t") 'mak::org-agenda-tasks)

As usual, there's more to do here, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. This is usable, and does what I need for now.