Re: Using the agenda to calculate how much work I have scheduled

[Matthew Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org>]

Hi Christopher,

Christopher DeMarco <demarco@maya.com> writes:

> I want to have a realistic expectation of what I can accomplish in a
> day.  So I want each TODO to have a time estimate of how long I think
> it will take, and for the agenda to add them all up and tell me how
> terrible my day is going to be.
>

Yes, try the following custom agenda command:

,----
|  (setq org-agenda-custom-commands
|        '(("E" "Effort view" agenda "" 
| 	  ((org-agenda-ndays 1)
| 	   (org-agenda-skip-function '(org-agenda-skip-entry-if 'notregexp "\\* TODO"))))))
`----

> First attempt: I found wonderful code on Sacha Chua's blog[1] which
> does this, but org-agenda-get-day-entries seems to return *all* "TODO"
> entries -- but I want to limit to entries which have only one state
> ("TODO", not "WAITING" or "DONE").  Is that possible?
>
> Is there a better way of doing this, with my limited Lisp?  I have
> looked at the Effort property, but I can't see how to use that from
> within an agenda view -- and the ability to know "what time it is
> now", and to therefore know how I fare in my daily plan, is important
> to me.

I use the following settings in my emacs file, using properties to set
my estimated effort - you can try tweaking the settings to your liking

,----
| (setq org-global-properties '(("Effort_ALL" . "0:05 0:10 0:15 0:30 0:45 1:00 1:30 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00 8:00")))
| (setq org-columns-default-format "%50ITEM(Task) %17Effort(Estimated Effort){:} %CLOCKSUM %20SCHEDULED %20DEADLINE")
`----

Then within the agenda view, I simply type C-c C-x C-c for a column
view that nicely sums up both the estimated effort on my todos for
today and the sum of the time I've spent on each item, so I can
quickly compare where I'm at vs. where I need to be.

One word of warning: if you have repeating tasks in your agenda, the
time for those tasks will include all clocked time to date, so this
could mess up your daily estimates. Also if your agenda includes
projects or todos with subtodos, the effort and clock sums will
reflect the subitems when you change the time in the agenda view.

If you want a really accurate grid of time clocked for the day, type
"R" for a clock report.

If you want to use the custom command above but jump right into agenda
view, you can add the following setting:

,----
|       (org-agenda-view-columns-initially t)
`----

Hope this helps,

Matt