Re: Tracking time from one state to another?

[Malcolm Matalka <mmatalka@gmail.com>]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

> On 2019-04-18, at 17:34, Malcolm Matalka <mmatalka@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:
>>
>>> On 2019-04-17, at 14:20, Malcolm Matalka <mmatalka@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> Is it possible in org-mode to track, and report, the duration of certain
>>>> state transitions in org-mode?  In particular, I'm interested in
>>>> tracking how long it takes me to go from a state that means I'm actively
>>>> working on an item to it being in a done state?
>>>>
>>>> In my case, an item might go from working, to waiting, to working, to
>>>> done.  And in this case I'm only really interested in the last working
>>>> to done time.
>>>>
>>>> For my case, I'm looking to do a weekly report on how long it takes me
>>>> to complete tasks that I have said I will work on.
>>>
>>> Hi Malcolm,
>>>
>>> that sounds interesting.  Since you can turn on logging of state changes
>>> (as you probably know), this is in principle possible, though I don't
>>> think it is built in.
>>>
>>> I guess writing a bit of Elisp to accomplish this should not be very
>>> difficult, though it seems that currently the problem is a bit
>>> underspecified.  If you could elaborate, e.g., provide an example of
>>> your state change log and describe the result you would like to get,
>>> I could be tempted to coding this.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>
>> Sure!
>>
>> So for my use case, I'm mostly interested in the last transition to a
>> finished state, but for simplicity I'll specify the two states I'm
>> interested in:
>>
>> Given states NEXT and DONE, I want to know the time between going into
>> NEXT and over to DONE.
>>
>> For example, given the following logbook:
>>
>>    :LOGBOOK:
>>    - State "DONE"       from "NEXT"       [2019-04-01 Mon 11:07]
>>    - State "NEXT"       from "TODO"       [2019-04-01 Mon 10:35]
>>    - State "NEXT"       from "TODO"       [2018-07-02 Mon 11:03]
>>    :END:
>>
>>
>> This item would be 32 minutes.
>>
>> This one:
>>
>>    :LOGBOOK:
>>    - State "DONE"       from "NEXT"       [2019-04-10 Wed 09:56]
>>    - State "NEXT"       from "WAITING"    [2019-04-10 Wed 09:40]
>>    - State "WAITING"    from "NEXT"       [2019-04-09 Tue 10:44]
>>    - State "NEXT"       from "WAITING"    [2019-04-09 Tue 10:10]
>>    - State "WAITING"    from "NEXT"       [2019-04-08 Mon 16:39]
>>    - State "NEXT"       from "TODO"       [2019-04-08 Mon 11:14]
>>    :END:
>>
>>
>> Would be 16 minutes.
>
> Are those :LOGBOOK: drawers real?  They are not sorted chronologically,
> as they probably should be (though I'm not sure, I don't se them
> much).

Yes they are real.  I'm not tracking going into a TODO state which is
hwy the first one looks funny.  And they are sorted chronologically, but
in reverse order, so top is most recent.

>
>> I'd like to specify what time range to do this for, and be able to sort
>> by duration.
>>
>> I think a dynamic block, like clocktable, would probably be a fine.
>>
>> Any idea what the level of work involved is to accomplish this?  I'm
>> guessing a very hacky version might be to modify clock table and look at
>> the logbook instead of clock and filter out all but the last transition?
>
> I don't think that's the best way - Org-mode code is famously
> complicated, it might be easier to do it from scratch (it'd be perhaps
> less general then, though).
>
> Anyway, it doesn't look like a lot of work - an hour or two for a rough
> prototype might be enough.

Is this something you're interested in doing?  If not if you have a
pointers I can try to take a poke at it.  My elisp skills are very-much
lacking but some progress is better than no progress.

>
>> Also, this is just the usecase I'm interested in, so if you have
>> thoughts on what a more general form would look like, that would be interested.
>
> No idea yet.
>
> Best,