From: Austin Frank <austin.frank@gmail.com>
To: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Use case of TIMESTAMP, SCHEDULED and DEADLINE
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 14:28:50 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <443AA3E2.5030908@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1144668069.8041.87.camel@elrond.novell.com>
Christian Egli wrote:
> 1. What is the use case of TIMESTAMP? I seem to only have a use
> for SCHEDULED, so marking them as "Scheduled:" in the
> Org-Agenda Week mode is superfluous for me. What do other
> people use it for?
Hello! In my previous thread I noted that I want to use org to manage
notes and tasks. This left out an important aspect of the way I have
used org and intend to, one of things that actually pushed me toward the
system in the first place. I also need to track how I'm spending time
on my tasks.
I recently lost ~20 lbs, and the most important tool for affecting that
change was writing down my weight every day and kept a running average
(I used the system described in the Hacker's Diet). Just seeing the
trend was enough to keep me motivated to eat a little bit less each day,
or find a small extra opportunity to be active.
As a graduate student I'm not required to do much in the way of
accounting for how I use my time, as long as certain long-term
milestones are met. This can make it difficult to stay on task during
shorter stretches. Even breaking large tasks into small ones and
documenting my progress on them can sometimes lead to a lot of small
tasks being put off just as long as the large one would have been.
So, just like for weight loss, I want to start keeping a record of my
daily time use. Hopefully, once I have enough data to aggregate and
look at the trends, I'll be able to pinpoint areas where I can improve
and will be able to motivate myself to stay on task longer or return to
my tasks more quickly after distractions.
A guide for beginning grad students in the computer science department
at my university suggests keeping a log file where you record your
accomplishments at 15 minute intervals on days when you're having
trouble being productive. I've tried this, using an external timer and
marking an org file with a time stamp for each entry. I found the
method to be both too frequent and too removed from my current task to
be especially useful.
My intention is to keep an org file (per day? per week? per month?)
where I track my work using timestamp ranges and links. When I start on
a task I'll make a time stamp and link to a resource relevant to the
task (the file I'm editing, the article I'm reading, notes from the
class I'm going to). When I finish a task or change tasks, I'll mark
the end of the time range I spent on that task (and begin a new one if
necessary). In some cases I'll record notes with the entry about what
happened while I worked, to try to pin down things that are especially
effective or especially distracting.
I do think there's something to the notion of making regular progress
reports while you work during stretches where it's hard to stay on task.
In a case where I was following this strategy, I would still start an
entry with a time range and a link to my current work, but I might
include sub-entries marked with timestamps to allow me to keep
finer-grained records of my progress. I intend to write a nag-me elisp
function that prompts for a new entry after a certain amount of time has
elapsed-- hopefully with programmable prompt intervals. I have a hunch
that an exponential function describing the interval between prompts
might be effective: record often early in the task to get myself honed
in, but record less often as time passes and I become more involved with
the work.
I believe that tagging these progress entries with a series of
categorical tags will allow me to aggregate across similar tasks and do
some analysis of how much time I'm spending on different tasks. I'd
like to be able to ask questions like "How much time did I spend last
week on project X?", "How much time did I spend last week on all
research projects?", and "How much time did I spend last week working
productively?". I'm hopeful that the org/tables/calc combination will
serve me well in pursuing this.
Hope that gives you some ideas about some potential uses of timestamps
and time ranges. I'd welcome any comments about the ideas I've
described here, whether people are using similar systems or have
different approaches to the same kind of issue.
Thanks,
/au
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2006-04-10 18:28 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2006-04-10 11:21 Use case of TIMESTAMP, SCHEDULED and DEADLINE Christian Egli
2006-04-10 12:46 ` Carsten Dominik
2006-04-10 18:28 ` Austin Frank [this message]
2006-04-11 10:30 ` Carsten Dominik
2006-04-11 13:45 ` Christian Egli
2006-04-12 4:38 ` Carsten Dominik
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