Re: Tracking time from one state to another?

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>]

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).

> 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.

> 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,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl