From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Kyle Meyer <kyle@kyleam.com>
Subject: Re: Format of Effort estimates should be mentioned in its Info node
Date: Sat, 04 Jan 2020 02:55:29 +0000
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To: Kisaragi Hiu <mail@kisaragi-hiu.com>, emacs-orgmode@gnu.org

Kisaragi Hiu <mail@kisaragi-hiu.com> writes:

> Currently, the Info node about effort estimates does not mention what
> format should it be written in. This causes confusion, as a user might
> assume that it's the same format as schedulers (10m, 6h, etc.) like I
> did.
>
> Simply mentioning "Effort estimates need to have the format H:MM"

I don't personally use effort estimates, but quickly poking around I see
some indication that estimates should work fine with things like 10min
rather than 0:10.  In particular org-set-effort has a bit that looks
like this:

  (org-refresh-property '((effort . identity)
                          (effort-minutes . org-duration-to-minutes))
                        value)

The presence of org-duration-to-minutes hints to some sort of
normalization:

  (org-duration-to-minutes "10min") ; => 10.0
  (org-duration-to-minutes "0:10")  ; => 10.0

And it looks like org-agenda-compare-effort uses the effort-minutes text
property.  That's presumably why, when I view the entries below in the
agenda, org-agenda-filter-by-effort (bound to "_") treats them the same:

  * TODO a
    :PROPERTIES:
    :Effort:  10min
    :END:

  * TODO b
    :PROPERTIES:
    :Effort:   0:10
    :END:

But that's just one use of effort values, and it sounds like you've hit
into cases where the 10min form didn't work as expected.  Could you
provide more details?

> (copied from the docstring or org-effort-property, the only*
> description of the format I could find) in the Info node would be
> enough.

Given the above, it seems like org-effort-property's docstring is at
least somewhat inaccurate.