In my last blogpost, I showcased how I review tasks finished over the last seven days. It implicitly assumes that I attend every group meeting^[1] and that the group meeting happens during the same time every week^[2].

In a more practical sense, it would be nice to generalize this workflow. I would like to specify a date, since when completed tasks would be displayed until the current day. This way I would be able to review my finished agenda items since a particular day in the past. This date would typically be when the group meeting last occured, but we are not strictly bound to it.

Implementation in emacs lisp

We write an elisp snippet similar to the one in the previous blogpost.

(defvar pani/last-group-meeting-date nil)

(setq org-agenda-custom-commands
      '(("v" "Finished tasks since last group meeting"
          tags
          (format "CLOSED>=\"<%s>\""
                  (setq pani/last-group-meeting-date
                        (org-read-date nil nil nil "Last group meeting: ")))
          ((org-agenda-overriding-header
            (format "Finished tasks since %s" pani/last-group-meeting-date))
           (org-agenda-archives-mode t)
           (org-agenda-tag-filter-preset '("-emacs" "-personal" "-email" "-misc"))
           (org-agenda-prefix-format '((tags . " ")))
           (org-agenda-remove-tags nil)))))

Most of the config options are similar so I won't be going over in detail. Let's instead point out the differences.

• Since we would like emacs to prompt for a date, we use the org-read-date function. We also replace the CLOSED>=\"<-7d>\"" with CLOSED>=\"<%s>\"" with %s being a placeholder for the specified date. For more details on org-read-date, read the official documentation.
• The org-agenda-overriding-header is slightly modified to display the text "Finished tasks since 2026-09-16" if 16th September is selected during the date prompt.
• We define a variable pani/last-group-meeting-date which stores the value of the date specified. Hence, before the custom org-agenda view is called, it stores nothing i.e. NIL.

To invoke this view, we simply run M-x org-agenda and hit v to get into the view.

Invoking custom org-agenda views (slightly) faster

Just like in the previous workflow, we write another function to invoke this custom org-agenda view and bind it to C-c v to invoke it faster.

  (defun pani/done-items-since-meeting-org-agenda ()
    "Prompt for the date of the last group meeting and show completed tasks since then.
It displays every DONE item closed from the chosen day upto today."
    (interactive)
    (org-agenda nil "v"))

When invoking the view, we are prompted for a date with a pop-up calendar. We select a particular date in the past; Typing "-wed" to select last Wednesday, we are instantly greeted with the following view:

With this, we can review tasks not just from the last seven days, but basically from any day in the past!